The Vending Route: Which Machines Pay

Your route grosses $2,000 a week. Here's the machine you drive to for free.

A vending route is a dozen small businesses sharing a van. The gross looks fine. The truth is in the machines — one pulls $500 a week in a hospital lounge, one pulls $60 in a church office and costs you forty minutes and seven miles every Tuesday. Most operators never price the second one, because their own time is free. It isn't.

Every machine, honestly. Sales, product, commission to the location, card fees, the reader, the machine payment, your restock time at a real wage, the drive from the last stop. Ten slots; type five numbers per machine and every line grades itself HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT.

The sample. Eight machines, $2,000 in sales, $555 profit after paying yourself, $141.68 per hour of your time. And the church office: −$2 a week. Pull it, and the route makes more in less time.

The answer block. How many machines lose money, how many pay but miss your bar, hours the route takes, the weakest stop by name, what the route makes if every red machine is pulled, and the hours that gives back.

The dashboard grades the route — profit per hour against your wage, machines clearing the bar, machines losing, product cost, commission, your time and the van, sales per machine against target, drive time — with a bar chart of every machine. One portrait page. Take it to the location that wants a bigger cut.

Built for

Snack and drink vending · combo and healthy vending · micro-markets · ATM routes · amusement and claw-machine routes · coffee service · anyone who fills machines from a van.

What you get

One .xlsx file, five tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A realistic eight-machine sample is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it.