Vending machine site selection and location guide

What to take away

What a site actually is

A location is three things at once, and operators who evaluate only the first make the same mistake repeatedly.

An audience: a set of people, present for a length of time, with or without alternatives. It is a contract: a commission rate, a term, and a set of obligations that decide how much of the sales you keep.

And it is a stop on a route: a fixed driving-time cost that recurs every cycle whether the machine sold well or not.

A site that is strong on the first and weak on either of the others is the classic bad placement. It looks busy, the host is pleased, and it quietly consumes more than it returns.

Captive and choice-rich audiences

The most useful division between sites is how much choice the buyer has at the moment they want something.

A captive audience is one that cannot easily leave: a night shift in a plant, a hospital floor between rounds, a residence hall at eleven at night, an airside gate area. The machine is not competing with a store. It is competing with going without.

A choice-rich audience can walk out and buy the same thing better and cheaper. A machine in a shopping center corridor, a lobby with a coffee shop in it, a workplace with a staffed cafeteria at lunchtime. Those sites can still work, but they work at particular hours: before the cafeteria opens, after it closes, on a weekend.

The practical question to ask the host is not how many people work here. It is when can people not leave the building, and how many are here then.

Counting traffic that converts

Foot traffic is the most quoted and least useful number in this trade, because most of it is people going somewhere else.

Collect a stopped count instead. Stand where the machine would go, at two or three of the building's busy periods, and count people who pause within reach of that spot.

Use a fixed interval, note the time and day, and repeat once. It costs an hour. It is the only site evidence most small operators gather about their machine.

Three things make a stopped count more informative.

What the commission does to a good site

Commission is charged on gross sales. Your costs come out of what remains. That asymmetry is why two sites with identical sales can sit on opposite sides of the line.

Take gross sales G, cost of goods C, commission rate K, and service cost S for the cycle. The site returns G - C - (K x G) - S.

S barely moves with volume, so a low volume site absorbs all of it and a high volume site spreads it. Because K applies to the top line, a commission increase costs more than the same increase applied to profit.

Before agreeing a rate, work out what the site returns at the sales level you expect, not the level the host hopes for. Then work it out at a lower level; that case decides whether the agreement is safe.

The clause work belongs with the product and price decisions that follow. But the commission conversation happens first and sets the ceiling on everything after it.

Service radius, and why distance beats sales

The binding constraint on a small route is how many machines one person can serve in a day. Distance, not demand, sets that number.

Draw your existing machines on a map and mark the area you can already reach without adding a trip. A site inside that area only has to cover its own service time. A site outside it has to cover a whole journey, and it must clear a much higher bar to be worth taking.

That is not an argument against ever going further; it argues for treating a distant site as the first machine in a future cluster, not a standalone win. Set a date by which it must have neighbors, and if it does not, move it.

The wider view of how a route grows covers what happens when this discipline slips.

Comparing site types honestly

Use it to ask the right question about a candidate, not to rank the categories. A weak site type with an excellent host beats a strong site type with an absent one.

Access is part of the site decision

Where a machine sits in a place of public accommodation, the way it is approached and operated is governed by federal accessibility requirements. The U.S. Department of Justice: ADA Guide for Small Businesses explains the obligations of small businesses in existing facilities, including barrier removal and accessible routes, in plainer terms than the standards themselves.

Before installation, settle three things with the host: where exactly the machine stands, the clear approach to it, and who is responsible for keeping that approach clear.

A machine placed in a corridor that later fills with stacked boxes is a problem for both of you. It is far easier to agree in advance than to raise later.

Questions to settle before you sign

The last question quietly decides retention. A host with no way to report a fault will report it by cancelling.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration: State Retail and Food Service Codes and Regulations directory names the state agency. That agency decides licensing and food rules at an address. General registration guidance sits with the U.S. Small Business Administration: SBA Business Guide.

For service labor budgets at a candidate site, take wage estimates by occupation and metropolitan area from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Tables rather than a national figure.

Reviewing a site after it is live

Set a review date when you sign, not when the site disappoints. Three cycles of real data will tell you more than any pre-placement estimate, and the review should compare the actual return after commission and service cost against what you assumed.

Sites do not usually fail suddenly. They drift: headcount falls, a cafeteria opens, a shift is cut, a competitor places a machine on another floor. A scheduled review catches drift while a machine can still be moved to a better building.

Common questions

How many people does a site need to support a machine?

There is no such number because it depends on how long people stay in the building, what else they can buy, your prices, your commission, and how far you drive.

You can answer whether the site's expected return after commission and service cost is positive at a conservative sales level. Run that on your own inputs.

Should I take a site with a high commission if it sells well?

Only after doing the arithmetic. Commission on gross with your costs coming out of the remainder means a high rate can leave a busy machine returning very little. Decide with the numbers rather than with the sales figure.

What if the host asks for a machine in a spot I think is wrong?

Say so, explain what you are basing it on, and offer a trial in their spot with a review date. Hosts usually have a reason, often about traffic flow or supervision, and sometimes they are right. Insisting without evidence costs goodwill you will need later.