Make money investing in vending machines

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Are vending machines profitable? : Entrepreneur

Full of excellent links to videos, articles, and books. Invest in vending machines? Has anyone invested in vending machines for passive income?

If so, could you explain how it went for you? He ended up getting out of it because it was a pain in the ass. It was all cash so he had a hard time keeping employees honest when servicing the machine and then he had to have a warehouse in a rough part of town lower rent and never felt safe having all the cash there.

Actually the machines account for this in a pretty interesting way. The machine owner still makes a profit even with the charge from the credit card company. That's actually why they call them laundromats. The fact that you can do your laundry there is merely a whimsical coincidence. Well, if I'm laundering my pants and they happen to have a few hundred thousand dollars in the pockets, that's a common mistake. Can't the machines keep tabs of how much money is in them?

Why didn't he buy a safe or deposit the money daily? I guess you'd have to fork up the dough for a more advanced machine but I've heard they can get so advanced as to even let you know what items are vended and exactly what time they are vended.

Then you can decide accordingly when is the best time to refill or when to replace a product that sells poorly. Yeah but he's not the one going out there to see how many items are missing.

The same guy stocking the machine, is the same one taking out money and possibly stealing it. You seem to be overestimating the inventory controls available to a small retailer.

Odds are that warehousing and delivery are the same employees, because you just can't justify dedicated warehousers without a pretty big fleet of trucks to keep them busy. And you have to account for loss, cans or bottle damaged in transit vs ones your guys aren't reporting would be almost impossible to discern. This company addresses that challenge: I have a gumball machine that I keep at a local bingo hall. In this case, they let me keep it all, a bit slower, but safer and I don't have to share.

Sounds like each machine generates enough profit to buy another machine in 2 years. At that rate you could literally have a million gumball machines after a mere 20 years! You could be a gumball tycoon! That's not counting the maintenance and the time. Imagine of them. If they have to be refilled once a month, you have to refill 20 of them per day.

Sounds like a huge pain in the ass. Besides, refilling 20 a day sounds easy peasy if you are decent at planning a route.

Can You Make Money With Vending Machines? | QuickBooks

It would be easy to pay a cut for someone else to run it. Rent the machine out. All you do is rent out the machine and sell refills. I mean, it wouldn't take more than 5 minutes to fill a machine. Assuming they're all in the same city, that's exactly one hour of actual "work". Drive to 20 spots in a city, find parking 20 times, pay for parking 20 times, refill 20 times - all of that would take 4 hours? I highly doubt that. I think machines in a single, even mid-sized, city would have to approach market saturation, no?

Probably long before that. Which means it's even worse, scaling that business to multiple cities is a major major pain. I'm assuming a US city is what we're talking about.

Ok, fine, substitute "pay for parking" with "find free parking". It all takes time and money gas, car depreciating in value due to more miles, oil changes, etc. We must live very different lives for paying and finding parking to be something that you think about.

I still have parking PTSD from living in Chicago. It was literally a major factor in my leaving the city. Add the cost of gumballs, the cost of the spot rent, and it's way way more than 4 per day. I understood him to say that he was in this particular location for free. But there are no doubt other costs. There's no way you can scale that - most places will want some fee to host your machine. Actually I think my math was off. I did 20 doublings instead of I think he'd have machines.

Should I Invest in a Healthy Vending Franchise? | Vending How

I thought you were being purposefully sarcastic, so that's how I intended my comment to read. Yes, he'd have 2 10 if he got a new one every two years. After two years he'd own two, after four years he'd own four, after six years he'd own eight, after eight years he'd own sixteen, etc.

After 2 years, you could buy a another for a total of 2. After one more year, you could buy another for a total of 3. After 8 more months, you could buy a 4th. Yeah, I thought about this. This really helps you and in fact you end up with a final value like 2. The actual results lie somewhere in between, I think. I'm not sure if there is an analytic way to compute them. Did you charge for that, then after you'd done some business with them, ask about the gumball machine?

Or was it a straight trade, gumball real-estate for social media marketing? I did charge them for helping them with their fb page, the gumball machine was after I might use this myself, if Gumballs are as good an investment as you say. You're not in CA are you? Have you considered using other machines, or other products? What's your plan for maintenance when you have multiple machines? What size gumball machine do you get?

Most of the ones i find on amazon stand 37 inches that seems a little short?? Vending machines with healthy food options seem to do really well where I live. Seems to be a growing trend and stands out more. I know a guy who owns change machines.

The ones where you dump in change and it adds it all up, then gives you cash. He has to split some of his profits with the stores he is placed in, but also agrees to give those stores rolled change to keep them from having to get that from the bank.

You can do the math. His biggest problems are:. He hasn't been robbed yet, but he still carries a gun with him when exchanges are being made. Because of American money laws, the banks keep an eye on people that do a lot of cash-based transactions. As a result, after his 3rd or 4th hall to the bank, he had to get a business banking account. A few more times after that, he was told that he would have to pay a fee because of the volume of coins he was bringing in was becoming time consuming.

He's gone through several banks but almost all end up trying to charge him a fee for bringing in lbs of rolled coins. That said, it's still a hobby job for him.

I don't think he's going to add too many more machines in the future. Some banks in the US have those also, but I don't think that'd work in this case, because he'd be trying to fit the coins from his machines, into a single bank machine Seems like it'd fill up super quick. At that level they give you specific large bags to put the coins in and expect you to count them through your own coin counter.

The count is checked against the weight and your deposit is completed cci indicator forex-tsd quickly. Charging a fee doesn't surprise me, as you said yourself its multiple 50lb bags, and most bank employees don't lift lol but you should be able to negotiate something reasonable.

First of all, it's NOT passive. You're constantly scrambling for locations and filling machines. Machines can sometimes needed to be filled twice a week if it's soda and a good location.

You want to have to fill them twice a week, it just means more money. Here's the deal with vending machines in general. It's all easy except for the one hard part, and the hard part is extremely hard.

Everywhere that has enough traffic to support a vending machine either has one already or doesn't want one. Your job is to walk into places with vending machines and convince them to kick the other guy out because you're better.

That's the ONLY obstacle in this business, but don't underestimate that obstacle. You can be beating down doors for a month before you get your first location. If you can get them placed consistently, it's only a matter of time before you're a millionaire. I used to work for Coke. Some people think a vending machine route is not hard at all. When I started in the vending scottrade options tutorial, I asked the guy I was with "how many machines are we gonna hit today" He said "24 if were lucky" I thought, 24?

We should have 24 done by lunch. He was right, 24 machines took 10 hours, and half of those were at a hospital. It's basically like this pending you can get them placedyou either place as many as you can service on your own, which will probably get you a 6 figure income if you 60 second binary options brokers how to win it right, and you have a pretty stress free job.

OR, after you get to that point you add employees and start expanding and it's really just replicating what you've already been doing. If you can do everything right with a vending machine 5 times, you can do it times.

Very easy to scale. I've been "the guy at the place". I spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with the guys who had the vending machines in our breakroom. Most of these guys did a poor job and I had to kick them out and go with another on multiple occasions. They were all small time part time guys who owned a few machines in addition to a day job.

They were all flaky to some extent. We didn't have enough employees to for the big vending companies to want us. Try and search for them if you haven't already - perhaps you could find some answers there too.

I read through a couple of older threads here and here and like many things, it's all about how low you can get in at, how much work you put into it, and how good the locations are. No doubt I'm missing something obvious, but it seems like an untapped, underserved market that wouldn't be competing with where it's being placed like outside a bar or club's restroom.

I suppose the trick would be to find a high enough traffic spot make money investing in vending machines the right price point the same problem everyone faces. Back in the old days, such vending machines with things like hair ties and travel sewing kits were often in rest stops and fancy hotels near the ladies room or just inside the ladies room.

They also sold american option pricing using binomial tree and pads. I've seen ones in clubs that sold simple slippers for the gals whose feet are killing them after a night in heels. I love Arto-mat machines. I seek one out in every city I visit. Makes a cool source of souvenirs.

A friend of Friends does this and they own nearly and make a pretty good living off of it. But it is possible to do very well. Keep in do anyone make money selling books on amazon or ebay amazon.com and the internet these are coke machines, not sticky hand machines.

The first thing I thought of when reading this was Medbox ticker: I had a finance professor who used to say it with tongue-in-cheek that it was his favorite stock to watch and he was hoping for big things for them. They make vending machines for medicinal marijuana. The new figures were considerably lower across the board, leading to a seriously dented bottom line. The issues with revenue recognition led to a SEC investigation and a torrent of litigation in the form of class action lawsuits.

I had no idea. I don't follow the company. They're basically a novelty for me. I just like how to make money selling fudge idea of a company that makes redbox for weed. I have a high school across the street, and one day it occurred to me that I could put out a vending machine near the road, aimed at the high schoolers passing by I think my neighbors would kill me zomg, he put a vending machine in his yard?!

There is a duplex a couple blocks away that has a vending machine Most big vending machines are owned and operated by the local distributor of that product, no? Such as, a Coca-Cola vending machine is owned and operated by that local Coca-Cola distributor. I assume the same is true for candy vending machines, but I'm not sure I imagine it's only as difficult as finding a location that isn't served by the product you want to vend. I believe and correct me if i'm wrong they don't get to benefit from the lack of a markup because from an accounting POV, they would track prices by their retail value, not the cost.

A niche vending nordstrom makeup brush set reviews could be interesting though. Hair pins, single use items like wipes, sanitizer, etc.

Then the question is: The vending machine of things that people forget sounds like something you should find in a hotel. But, the hotel would probably want a substantial cut if they allowed it at all. I'm thinking cheap sunglasses at outdoor events; sporting events, concerts, etc The DMV by me has a vending machine for pens like 50 cents each.

They could charge 10x that and still constantly be selling. My friend in high school ran a candy vending machine route with his dad. I don't think they made much money but they made some.

It seemed more like it was a cool thing to do with his kid. Anyways, from what I've gathered talking to them, they mostly seem to be ran by commercial bank stock brokers sri lanka operations like themselves. It was always something I wanted to do with my kids but I wonder what kind of traffic they still get today.

I used to work for Coca Cola. Most, but not all of the machines by Coke or Pepsi, etc. Some machines get sold to a private vendor who in turn agrees to buy their product through the local bottler. They even pay for LED scoreboards for high schools to get the machines in the school. The only way to break into an area that is already saturated is to buy an existing route. If you're gonna get into the vending machine business, you better be diversified. Drinks, food and whatever else you can think of.

Its a cut throat business. This snack vendor kept wiping his machine's grease on my buttons. So every time I saw his sticker on a machine, I dropped 4 or 5 pennies in his slot and that will usually jam it, but a folded up piece of paper will do the job too. For the most part everybody gets along and usually treats each other like a co-worker. But their is always a few who get petty.

Those kind of numbers can make the pettiness worth it. I used to refill these things as a job. Pain in the ass for the owners. Pm me if you want more in depth info. Might just sell them. They made good money especially during high school. I had a job at a country club to fund the investment. After everything was paid off, the passive income doubled that of my income from the country club. If you are looking into this, look into the legalities. If some dumbass chokes on a ball, who will be sued?

You, the restaurant, the manufacturer, etc? Much less chance of some kid throwing a brick into the break room vending machine and it's all indoors and out of the weather. They require a lot of maintenance, you should be available at any time to pick up a call and drive down to the machine to fix the problem.

That is, if anyone actually bothers to call you. Coke, gumballs, tampons don't have an expiry date you actually have to worry about, the milk in your coffee has. Having said that, if you can put it off you can get a decent turnover. I'm studying for the last exam to my Masters degree, and I'm browsing the web looking for information on coffee vending machine. I have a couple of places in mind. To be honest, I don't know yet all the answers, because I need to get in touch with the distributors.

I don't want to put in an extremely public place, because it will probably get tagged and sprayed by those shitty graffers. Like many other responders, I looked into this for a while and learned that location is everything.

Pros & Cons of Buying a Vending Machine Business | uqyhadet.web.fc2.com

Which was pretty cool. But everywhere I had that I could put them apartment communities mostly had a high risk of vandalism I heard this secondhand, but someone told me of a retired dentist in the area that owned several ATM machines. Was told it was very good money.

I wonder if he owned the gas station as well I am assuming it is standard for a company owner to buy their own ATM. Unless the dentist had a monopoly in a certain area that made servicing the ATM cheap, I dont see why a company owner would leave money on the table like that. Why give a cut when any worthwhile establishment can pay a few thousand to get their own machine?

If this guy is real he needs to have something exceptional in the works. Maybe try to search through that subreddit? The post got a pretty solid amount of attention, from what I remember. I've put money into vending machines before, but it usually just results in a bag of chips or a soda.

A friend of mine runs vending machines for bicycle inner tubes and they are doing really really good. They are mostly placed in towncenters or tourist attractions a lot of people go by bike where im fromi think you need to come up with something not a lot of people have done before so no soda, condoms, gums and so on.

So far so good. We invested in 20 machines and at first we had a hard time placing the machines. We were able to get 3 machines placed, but the profits were not just there.

It was due to low foot traffic. We eventually went with a company that placed the machines. Something they should of been doing for us. Let's just say they sucked and eventually I think they had to change their name. We gave it one more shot and went with another locator for our machines.

This time they did everything all we had to do was drop off the machines.

Right now we still have 5 machines left but the other ones are making a very good profit since they are in places with heavy foot traffic. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

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This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment. He ended getting out of the business as a result. You would deal with less cash but other costs.

May get more customers though. Anyone who has a few hundred thousands dollars and pants.

I'm going to keep doing it. So for so good. I'd take that any day. In fact I just ordered What kind of market is in a huge demand of gumballs? That sounds waaay too good to be true. So after cost of gum balls, maintenance, gas etc. He'd still have I feel that would be more in tune with reality. I plan on having more machines, and need a unique "in" so thank you very much. The cheapest place I can find the gumballs is at Sam's club. His biggest problems are: So is this your full time job?

Do you know millionaire vending machine owners? Where I am now, one of my favorite vending machines is the Art-o-mat. If this is true, I'd imagine this would be a very difficult market to enter. Working only 1 job but getting twice the pay? Hell yeah If you are looking into this, look into the legalities. I will buy one this year and see how it goes. Not willing to risk too much money. FYI, I would at least look into the following criteria: Average amount of service required does it need be refilled on a daily basis?

Price per cup; can you just pour in any type of coffee or are you restricted to certain pads of a certain brand? How 'idiot proof' is the machine?

One crucial aspect for the machine is to be able to give some change, at least in my country. I am very interested in doing this as well! Posts are automatically archived after 6 months.