One thing i forgot to mention is your "how hard is it to find locations". My wife and I along with our kids do all the work together. Her "job" is to go out and talk to people to try to place the machines. She has about a 10% - 20% success ratio? Probably closer to 10%. So your going to get more No's than a yes. We use a charity so we have all that printed out, plus kind of our business statement printed out (which is what we are trying to do for our charity with our family). And it's really just going in someplace, getting to talk to the owner or manager and asking to place a machine for your charity. (Bring a nice big picture of your machine as well so they can see it). Most people that say no are nice and have their reasons, she just says thanks and moves on. Some times the manager/owner isn't around so she asks when a good time to talk to them and re-visits them at that time.

I think i read some where on-line that the industry average is $13 per machine per month? Not sure... but i have recently went from 3 machines (Vendstars and had them in place for about 2 years) to 41 machines. I did this with a combination of buying a route and just buying machines and placing them (on my own and using a locator). After the past 4 months we currently just above $14 average per machine per month. The highest machine has done $75 in one month and the lowest doing $0.75. What we do is we color code our machines on each route on our spread sheet. Red = $5 and under, Yellow = $5.25 to $13, Green = $13.25 and up. We then go back on our route a few months later (except the $0.75 one we pulled in one month for several reasons) and pull the Reds off the route (and sometimes Low yellows). I think i read some place that for every 10 machines you place you'll get (and i'll use my color scheme) 2 Reds, 6 Yellows and 2 Greens. Thus if we pull 5 Reds out of our route we hope to get 1 green and 4 yellows etc. So the bottom line is what is good enough for you per machine per month? It's different for everybody. When we first ramped up and we had 20 machines in our living room we said "Let's leave the $4.00 per machine on route because it's better than the ones that are sitting in the living room!". After we got down to only a handful left in the living room ( a few months later) we then started pulling the reds.

As far as candy goes. We use Peanut M&M's, M&M's, Reese Pieces, Skittles, Mike and Ike's, Hot Tamales, and Gum. Peanut M&M's sell the best but your profit isn't as much. And it really depends. I print out a sheet with all the labels on it and show the owners of the place i'm trying to locate a machine and ask them which ones do they want. Some tell me exactly what they want, some don't care, and some won't tell me because they are trying to break their candy habbit! lol. If they don't tell us we just guess. Are there kids at that location alot? If so we use the Kids type candy. Our one location is a break room at a factory so we put in PMM, HT and Skittles. All these do REALLY well at this location.

Another thing we do, which i'm not sure how many people do, is that when we collect the money we keep each head separate and count and record for each head. That way we can see when we look at a machine on our spread sheet what is doing well on what location. We have turned a number of "yellows" into "Greens" by just changing out the one canister that isn't doing well. Each machine has a code (Like A1, A2, B1, B2, etc) and then we numbered each head 1, 2, 3 as your looking at them and then physically labeled the back (after you remove the locking back) 3, 2 , 1 (cause your now looking at them back wards). We then have a big zip lock bag that is labeled per machine with 3 smaller zip locks in them. We have three routes and each route we have all the big zip locks in a reusable shopping bag that we will bring out on our route.

That is how we do things ... and we just really are trying to figure all this out and we are learning and just trying to make this thing work. SO far so good... stay organized is a big thing for us and just keep trying new things and manage your route.

Hope this helps!

After posting the above i remembered that i saw on ebay a few years ago somebody selling portion wheels that will vend 1" Gum balls. So after i posted i looked on Ebay and the guy had posted some more. So i ended up buying one and trying it. Once i received it i tested it out with 1" gum balls and ran about $10 through and it never missed a vend. After that test i went back to Ebay and bought 9 more from the guy. Bottom line is that they do work, i can buy a case of 1" gum balls from Sam's for about $20 bucks with tax and i'll make about $200 per box (comes out to $0.02 per vend).

But like my previous post ... the smaller gum balls vend well... just not as much profit from them (About $0.07 per vend) and i have to order them on-line so not as easy to acquire.

Hello back again,

I got my money back from kickstart in a promt manner, I decided to go to businessbeanstalk.com, you can talk to them on the phone, and they don't give you false hope, I received a great location in about a week....sooooooooooo excited!!!

Let me know how that location is after a month when you check it out for the first time...i'm curious!

I vend the .50" double bubble Gumballs out of my vendstars with no problems.

http://www.gumballs....balls-8500.html