Vending Machine Business Pricing Of Products

When I started doing the vending business during the year of 2012, I was able to acquire around 20 machines at 6 locations. Was i scammed ? I was a returning Canadian citizen coming back after an absence of 10 years. The machines at the locations are well over 15 years old machines and it is a normal configuration of a POP and Snack Separate machines. The prices of the products are very low and the margin is minuscule and thereby making no point in servicing the locations. For example the price of a chocolate bar is $1.25 and my cost during that time was already $0.70.

The computation for the margin is actually very good but most locations are already pricing their chocolate bars for $1.75 to $2.00 and most of the vendors was pricing it at $1.50. It is just that I have several locations and if you are selling a lot of chocolate bars then it wouldn’t matter if the price is $1.25, I tried to adjust the price to $1.50 and no one touched it for about 1 month and then after that normal sales poured in.

So the normal pricing of a product inside the vending machine would be like the examples below:

pop 1.25 to 1.50

chocolate bars 1.75 to 2.00

cookies 1.50 to 1.75

I remember that me and my wife invested around $10,000 on a manufacturing location at Port Coquitlam somewhere in Kebet Way and it was an extremely busy location wherein we go there every week and the snack and pop machines are always empty, we were very nice to the office personnel and even give some freebies on visits.

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We tried to adjust the low prices of the chips from 1 to 1.25 and chocolate bars from 1.25 to 1.50 and after a couple of days, the plant manager called us and complained on the price and after 1 week the snack machine was vandalized and everything inside the machine was stolen and coin mechanism was destroyed.

Even after that incident the Office Personnel even told my wife to move the machine to 1 side first because they are renovating the lunch room and after 2 weeks my wife was surprised that her snack and pop machines was moved out of the lunch room and there was new vendor offering Micro Market

The Office Personnel in that location didn’t’ even informed that they need some options or variety or a change that we could provide if needed. My wife lost $10,000 investment. This is such a big loss when we were just starting out our vending business, the vehicle during that time that we are using was a run down Ford E250, as the story goes, even if you did your best in business, there are locations that you have to make sure that you have rapport with the manager.

My wife actually did all the talking with the personnel but this was such a bad experience, this caused some stress but after that we just thought that maybe there will be a better opportunity that will come along after this. Imagine we had that location for about 2 years and servicing it properly and the management office was not honest and open, we should have negotiated for a newer machine or offered the micro market as well.

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