All of our customers want to know where the best locations for their vending machines will be. What types of businesses? Where inside a particular location will get the most traffic? Many people new to the vending industry think that this is an easy question to answer, but it is actually a very difficult question to answer.

We can always give pointers based on what we have seen work in the past, but often times we are surprised by reports from our customers of what the best and worst locations actually turned out to be. Many locations that seem very busy with a lot of foot traffic have turned out terrible in reality. Then, there are often stories of places where the machine is out of the way, in a small little place that nobody seems to go and ends up being a spectacular income generating location.

We have found over and over again with very few exceptions, that the employees who work at a location are the ones who use the machine the most. This seems like it may be contrary to common sense, but we have seen this, and many of our customers have also relayed this information to us. Take two similar pizza carry-out / delivery restaurants as a hypothetical example. They both get a good amount of foot traffic, but maybe one of them only produces $15 per month, while the other is producing over $60 per month and the machine always seems to be empty whenever it is time to service it. This is a real example from a route that I personally run. In the really good location, it was the employees that were getting addicted to the candy, and they were always using the machine several times per day.

I have also had one particularly bad performing machine in a Chinese restaurant that was open late into the night because they had concerts and comedy shows going on upstairs. The location obviously got a LOT of traffic, but the machine was one of the worst I had, selling less than $2 per month! The problem was that the owners of the restaurant wanted us to have it in the side entrance, apparently a door that nobody uses. They refused to let us put the machine in the front entrance or anywhere else. Eventually, I decided to take the machine out of that location because it wasn’t worth it.

One of the best locations I have had was inside a dirty, grungy auto parts warehouse in the interior hallway. This is a place that most people would think would be terrible. It was dirty, small, and it wasn’t in a place where customers would even know it was there. But there were several employees that used the machine constantly, and that consistency of use every day really adds up.

Sometimes you think you have an idea of how well a location will do when you are placing a machine. But I would estimate that more than 50% of the time, your idea is wrong. The only real way to tell if a location will be good or not is to try it for a few months, try asking people at the location what they would want in the machine and what they would like the most, and wait and see.