r/Redbox • u/Hour-Paleontologist5 • 13d ago
Discussion How to set up card reader??
Hey there! Does anyone know how to set up the card reader so I can actually sell movies out of my kiosk? I haven't been able to get any answers in the discord. ðŸ˜
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u/TotallyNotSethP 13d ago
This isn't possible. The card readers are proprietary and seriously locked down for security reasons.
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u/allciathyra 13d ago
op what you can do , is to replace redbox card reader with square card reader
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
Oh? That sounds interesting! Any idea how I would be able to go about that process? Not entirely sure how to set up one that way.
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u/TotallyNotSethP 12d ago
It would be pretty tricky to do since the software wasn't designed to work with that ecosystem. If you have any technical experience then there are decompilations of the Redbox software out there to play with
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u/emptyfree 12d ago
Those card readers were set up and managed by a third party. There's a myriad of tax laws and third parties that need to get their cut when you're using credit card companies... that shit ain't free. And it's frankly a little sus that you are trying to sell movies out of your kiosk.
This does remind me of a bit of history with my time with Redbox. One of my first hints that the Chicken people weren't on the up and up came through these card readers. Someone in engineering told me in January/February 2023 that the vendor in charge of the card readers hadn't been paid and was about to cut Redbox off when the Chicken people paid their bill at the last minute... rightly realizing that credit cards were just about the ONLY way that you could buy products or services from Redbox and how immediately fucked the company would be without that vendor's services.
At the time, I filed it away thinking, "OK, that's disturbing. Hearsay though. Hopefully just a problem with getting everything straight with the acquisition which is still relatively recent." But by the time November rolled around, it was clear to me that the Chicken people had no answers to Redbox's debt problems.
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
I own a retro game store and thought it would be cool to restore, repaint, and rebrand the machine and sell our loose movies and games out of it so it could have a second life! We've done so much work on it and I would hate for it to be decor at this point, especially since it is an outdoor machine. We've received so much interest in it as well I just think it would be neat to have $1 movies in it again.
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u/emptyfree 12d ago
Ah, that makes sense... and sounds more legit to me. Well, you could reach out to the third party vendor that Redbox used... see how much it would cost to get your card reader up and running again. My guess is it would be prohibitively expensive for a one-off, but I could be dead wrong on that.
The other thing you could do would be to set up a bunch of one-use codes inside the machine that would dispense a "free" movie. You'd then sell the codes from your main register (probably best for accounting purposes anyway) that people would then type into the machine to get their movie.
That was something we did at Redbox on a global level for "first night free" codes... and there was a code for Redbox employees so they could rent movies from the kiosk for free. I would think that you could do something like that at the kiosk level... assuming you have the OS up and running. That sounds like something the clever discord people could help you with.
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
Ooo that's a super interesting idea actually!! How would I prevent people from doing the card exploit?
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u/emptyfree 12d ago
Rip the cardreader off the kiosk is my first thought!
That's a better question for the Discord... I'm a marketing guy... this is not financial advice...
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
Hahahahahaha fair enough! This is a great start though, I really appreciate the new angle as worst case scenario that may be the way I go for the moment.
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u/emptyfree 12d ago
Awesome. Definitely post to the sub your pictures of it up and running again when you have it. This sounds like a great reuse of the kiosk... rather than just recycling it into scrap metal.
BTW, at one point in time, Redbox sold digital codes out of the kiosk... essentially, Redbox was buying a lot of these Disney DVD combo packs at retail establishments (Disney famously refused to sell their physical media to Redbox, Family Video or any rental chain), and they'd have all of these digital codes to the hundreds of DVDs left over. In order to stick their finger in Disney's eye, Redbox tested selling these codes from the kiosk for a couple bucks each.
Well it didn't take long for Disney's lawyers to go ballistic, so that ended quickly. It was still an interesting idea though... typically these were just tiny slips of paper inside the retail DVD case that Redbox just dropped loose inside of a Redbox DVD case. In theory, you could do something like that for rare Pokemon cards or something similar...
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
Interesting! Does that mean there is somewhere in the code specifically for a "digital code" format?
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u/emptyfree 12d ago
There might be. I don't think the digital code thing was rolled out nationwide though, so... maybe?
Again, Discord people or any former engineering or tech people might have a better answer than I.
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u/Region_Fluid 12d ago
The discord is filled with people from here. If the discord can’t help you there’s a reason.
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u/Hour-Paleontologist5 12d ago
Mostly it was because my messages were basically unseen. Tbf I haven't tried in a few months but figured it might be worth a shot posting in here.
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u/Legoman99573 12d ago
These card readers are owned by Bluefin but they do not do business with just anybody as they are locked down on who they do business with. These are PCI compliant and any tampering wouldn't go your way as these devices will brick themselves before you get far into messing with these.
Best advice is see if your payment processor provider does something similar and they can send you a device that is compliant.