Things to Know About Vending
It’s very competitive; it’s not uncommon to see locations with 3 or more vending machines. Personally, I don’t waste my time if there is more than 1 other machine.
It’s hard to get and keep good locations. Sometimes you’ll get a good location and the business will close or move, or other venders may start to crowd you out.
The average vending machine only makes about $7 per head.
You need a LOT of machines to make a living. It’s easy to do the math on this, 100 double headed vending machines will make about $14 on average which is $1400 a month. But you still need to figure on about 10%-35% expenses such as product cost and gas. As you can see, you’ll need several hundred machines to have what most people would consider a full time income.
It takes about 15-20 minutes to service a location including driving, so if you have a well designed route, you can do 3-4 locations an hour.
You will need to spend about 2 minutes a day per location on book keeping and coin counting. Some people do their coin counting as they service using a counter in their vehicle and this may definitely be the way to go when your route starts to get really big. Currently I’m counting and rolling at home without a counter because my route is still fairly small.
Investing in a route/book keeping computer program designed specifically for vending is money well spent. A lot of people use and design their own excel programs when starting out or find one available for free online. This is fine when starting out, but once you start having 100+ locations, professional software is a good investment.
If you buy used vending machines, it’s advantageous to have machines made by the same manufacturer. Too many different types of machines can actually end up costing you money in the long run. These machines break a lot and having interchangeable parts makes the process a lot cheaper and easier.