Good collection yesterday

[TexasFreemason]

I know I have heard talk that bulk vending is dead, and I know my sales dropped because of covid, but I had a great collection yesterday. Has anyone else noticed a comeback?

[gumball guy]

8 hours ago, TexasFreemason said:

I know I have heard talk that bulk vending is dead, and I know my sales dropped because of covid, but I had a great collection yesterday. Has anyone else noticed a comeback?

Congrats on the great collection! Always nice to have a days like that.

Last year was one of my best sales years in the last decade and so far this year's sales have been strong. Now there are some caveats to that. Over the last 2 years I have been locating in far more ethnically diverse areas. My Latino and Asian locations have been the primary "bread winners" on my routes and expanding aggressively into those areas has paid off significantly for me. Conversely, I have seen an overall sales drop in many of my longstanding locations in affluent and rural communities over the last 12 months. I attribute that to more people going cashless in those areas. 

I think bulk vending still has a few years left but eventually, unless something dramatic and unforeseen occurs, it will disappear. My biggest issue right now is sourcing candy at a reasonable cost. Gumballs will be profitable as always but word on the street is Mars and Hershey are about to bump their prices again which will all but eliminate vending Reece's Pieces and M & M products at 25 cents. That hurts because I do have locations that really want those product options.

 

[AngryChris]

Even vending machines are dwindling to some degree.  Slowly, but surely.  I don't think they will fully disappear for quite some time if at all but the weird part is the big guys are pretty much focusing entirely on markets from what I see and the really little guys can barely tap into anything of substance because the costs of machines.  So that leaves the guys like myself with more than one route but not huge that can afford to do things.  I mean it's kind of nice because I feel like I am in a niche right now but the point is that everything is changing.  People used to trade with gold way wayy back in the day and here we are now..

[gumball guy]

22 hours ago, AngryChris said:

Even vending machines are dwindling to some degree.  Slowly, but surely.  I don't think they will fully disappear for quite some time if at all but the weird part is the big guys are pretty much focusing entirely on markets from what I see and the really little guys can barely tap into anything of substance because the costs of machines.  So that leaves the guys like myself with more than one route but not huge that can afford to do things.  I mean it's kind of nice because I feel like I am in a niche right now but the point is that everything is changing.  People used to trade with gold way wayy back in the day and here we are now..

I have also noticed that almost all of my large manufacturing facilities have switched over to markets. Lucky for me that almost all of them have allowed me to stay and surprisingly they all seem to do well.