Starting up a bulk vending route is as easy as buying a few cheap used machines online and boom you’re up and running. It ain’t brain surgery. With most businesses, you need a substantial cash investment and more likely than not a business loan in order to get started. Fortunately with vending, none of this is necessary, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a full understanding about what’s involved in building up a route and running it. You’ll find a lot of businesses out there inflating the money you can make from vending machines or touting vending as an automated cash machine, but this isn’t the complete picture, so let’s dive in and separate the fact from the fiction.
Vending is all about eking out a profit; it requires hundreds of machines in order to earn a full time income. Individual machines may not make that much money, but they are time efficient to manage and when you put 400 in a route, it slowly adds up to a living. I always tell people to figure on averaging about $14 gross or $12 net per double head machine per month. This is a pretty good base to start your math and from my experience pretty accurate. This means that a 100 machines will make you $1200 a month in profits free and clear. This number may not be rocking you world, but keep in mind that a double head machine only costs about $150 and used vending machines can be had for as cheap as $50 a piece. This means that a vending machine will pay for itself in 6 to 12 months. Not a whole lot of businesses are profitable after only 6 months, so while this may not seem like a lot of money, it starts to add up. Plus, it’s quite easy to manage 400 machines. In fact, it’s quite easy to manage 600+ machines and some venders have 800+, but I wouldn’t want to have this many unless I had an employee.