I still need a location for my soda machine

The vending machine moves went well. We got all three machines moved. The two that we switched out were working great as of Thursday and Friday. My poor kids were exhausted after the moves. We went to all three locations twice. I had to go and unload the machines, and then reload the machines that were switched. Then we had to go and clean up the floor under the machine at the location that we lost. I am glad it is all done.

I decided to go on with plan B and C for finding a location. Today I visited one apartment complex that didn't have a machine, but they did not want one. I visited a second complex that has two machines. The first one I saw was not functioning. I was excited, but as we went to the office, we saw the second machine. It was running. I didn't see if it was actually working. We went in and talked to the really nice person that was working there. She gave me the names of three other apartments to try. I offered her the same finders fee that I offered my other locations' personnel. Maybe one of them will pan out.

I found a list of all of the apartment complexes in our zip code. Tomorrow the kids and I will try to visit as many of them as possible. I decided that I would take the kids with me. They might discourage some of the potential locations, but they are part of this business. Plus, they are cute and memorable. Then if the people ask, I can tell them that we are doing this to send the kids through school. That lets them know that we are in this business for the long term and that it is important to us.

I thought of another option if plans A-D do not yield a location for my orphaned machine. Plan E is to pay a locator service to help me place my soda machine. I do not want to go that way if I can avoid it. I need very specific locations that will let me take the kids with me. Many of the locations that I was given last time I used a service where small business run by men. Small business usually do not want noisy kids disturbing their employees and customers. The kids are usually good, but they can be noisy just because there are four of them.

I have also checked Craigslist. I found a person selling several machines on location. I will have to call him and get a little more information. The price is right, but I don't know if the locations are right for us.

Tomorrow is moving day.

The soda machines are going to be moved tomorrow. I decided that since I was moving one machine, that I might as well move two other machines. Tomorrow is the big day.

I am switching two machines. My army recruiting station machine is selling much less than in the past. I have not determined the cause. I have a great multi-priced bottle machine there. I decided that my storage location would benefit from having bottles of water and Gatorade instead of just cans of soda. So, we are switching the two machines. I am a little nervous about the switch. I only have to one bottle machine, so I will have to purchase bottles separately for it. When I move the machine, I will not know how often I have to go and fill it up. I anticipate that Gatorade, Propel, and water will sell well over the summer. The problem is that the new water bottles tend to get jammed in the machine. The eco-friendly design is not machine friendly. The package says that it will vend, but I have been having trouble with them vending properly. I guess I will just check the machine every week for a while until I get a feel for how many drinks are selling. It is like placing a machine at a whole different location.

The switch should mean that I have to go to the recruiting station much less. Cans do not expire as quickly as bottles. I was having an issue with condensation. This machine should be much better.

I have lost one of the apartment locations. I am going to give the manager a thank you note and I am thinking of going and getting some cookies or other goodies. I am still hoping that someone in the office will turn me on to a new location. If I don't hear anything in another week or so, it is onto plans B, C and D.

Lost Location

I lost one of the locations for my soda vending machine. It is at one of the three apartment complexes. The supervisor told the manager that corporate had a new vendor that they wanted to go with. Apparently, there is nothing wrong with my service, corporate has just made a decision about who they want to have at their apartments. I am disappointed about their decision. I think that they are making a mistake, of course. I provide some of the best service that they will get. There are not many soda machine operators that will answer calls on the weekend or in the evening. I seldom see a machine that has a contact number on it. I know for a fact that their last contract did not even come close to the service that I provided. I had to remove the machine from the property and call the company that owned it to come and pick it up. It took the apartment complex 2 months of calling before I took care of their problem. It took me 2 more months of calling to finally get the vending machine returned.

The complex that I lost is the lowest producing complex. The machine is located in a gym that is closed at 6 PM. Many people want soda much later than that. I had asked several times to move the machine outside so that it had 24 hour access. I think the complex could have been my highest producing one if the machine was outside at a convenient location. I am more worried about losing my other location that is part of the same corporation. I have not heard anything from them and I gave them their commission this morning.

So, now how do I find a new location? It is very hard to drag 4 kids along to a bunch of apartments while I asked the managers if I can place a machine there. People tend to get overwhelmed with the kids. My kids are good, but 4 young children is unusual enough that people don't know what to think.

Plan A: I have decided to pay a finders fee of $100 to any of the apartment personnel that connect me with my next location. This is the first time I have tried this, so I don't know if it will work. I have given a flier to the personnel in each of the three apartment complexes that I have machines at. My hope is that they are impressed enough with my service and could use $100 that they will recommend me to some of their friends that work at other complexes in the area. Several of the women said that they would find me something. I will just have to wait and see. I will move the machine in about 10 days. I am hoping that I have somewhere to move it to. Otherwise, I might have to go to plan B.

Plan B: I know several locations that do not have a soda machine. I will try finding someone to watch the kids while I go over and talk to the managers and see what they suggest.

Plan C: Dropping in on as many of the apartment complexes in the area as I can without the kids, perhaps while my husband is home on Saturdays.

Plan D: Offering a finders fee through fliers placed on the machines themselves.

Right now, I am not too desperate. I will try just plan A. If I loose the location of the sister complex to the one I am loosing, I will be desperate and have to implement one or all of the other plans.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on getting locations that are kid friendly? I have been blessed with falling into the locations that I have now as easily as I did.

Excess humidity a problem for my soda machine

The popping noise turned out to be the fan from the compressor hitting the metal "hat" over the compressor coils in my soda machine. When I got to the soda machine, the compressor was covered with fluffy snow white ice, the sodas were warm, and the fan was definitely hitting something. I had to unplug the compressor and the fan. After some investigation, I found that the flap that lets the sodas fall into the dispenser was lying in the dispenser instead of hanging in the door. This machine has a faulty flap. When I first purchased the machine, the flap was missing and the one they replaced it with isn't the exact match. Every once in a while it comes out and falls into the dispenser. Well, it turns out that the compressor does not like that much warm, humid air entering the cooling chamber. It works over time and freezes up.

Luckily, it is easy to fix a snow white frozen compressor. I unplugged it and the fan while leaving the rest of the machine plugged in so that it would still vend sodas. I left a note on the machine while I came home and got my handy blow dryer. With blow dryer in hand, I heated the ice on the compressor until it melted. Then I repositioned the "hat" so that it wasn't hitting the fan. I reattached the flap and plugged everything back in. I checked the machine the next morning and it was working as good as new.

Now if I could figure out how to get another one of my machines from filling up the water overflow tank in the summer. I have replaced the original tank with one at least twice as large. I have placed extra sponges in it so that there is more surface area for the air to blow over it and evaporate the excess water. Still it overflows by the second week. This is a machine that I really wouldn't have to check but twice a month except for the water overflow problem. In the winter, I do not have a problem. I can go a month or two without having to empty the water. The machine is in an indoor climate controlled location. I have checked the seal and looked for areas that could be leaking warm air and have not found any.

I was called today for another jam at one of the apartment complexes. Someone had put in a handful of coin car wash tokens. I just wonder why they thought that those would work. I am just hoping that it was kids that didn't know better rather than an adult just trying to get some free soda. Maybe I can find the car wash that takes the tokens and wash my van.

Tomorrow is another day in this exciting vending business. I wonder what I will find.

Summer is great for soda vending

Summer is here. Well, not officially by the calendar, but schools are letting out and it is heating up. We should hit 100 F his week. I am so excited. As the temperature rises, the soda sales go up. I love summer time. Already, I can see sales increasing. I noticed that the pools at one of the apartment complexes that I have my soda vending machine opened last week.

As sales increase, so does coin jams and other mechanical problems. I have had to do a lot of monitoring of the vending machines at apartment complexes. I guess the people there have spring/summer fever like my four year old. The last two weeks I cannot get him to stop climbing the walls (literally, as well as trees, furniture, and anything else). Someone put 20 pennies in one of my machines last week. I have been checking one machine every day or two. I always put a sign on the machine that it is working and when it was last checked or fixed. That helps get the customers back faster after a big coin jam or two.

I just got a call about one of my machines making a popping sound. I am really curious about that one. I have to wait until the kids wake up from their nap.

Summer is wonderful for business. Go out and make some money.

Soda machine sees the light

I finally did it. I got the light working on my soda machine. I have a location that is outside at an apartment complex. I thought that it needed the lights working, but since I buy used machines, I got one without the lights working. I tried more than a year ago to replace the bulbs. That didn't work. So I knew that it was the ballast.

I was overwhelmed with the idea of replacing the ballast. It did not have any connectors that just unplugged. I had to actually cut the ballast wires and rewire a new one. Now that I completed the project, I don't know why it was so daunting. All I had to do was unplug the ballast from the main power, unscrew one screw, cut the wires at both ends of the ballast, remove the ballast, go to the home improvement store and find a replacement, strip the wires back 1/4 inch, match black to black, white to white, red to red, and blue to blue, and reconnect the wires. It was so easy. I want to go over there one evening and see what it looks like lit up. It was too bright outside today to see much difference.

I am hoping that having the machine lit up at night will encourage more people to buy soda after dark. I will have to just wait and see if my guess is correct. Now I have three more machines that need the lights replaced. I think the difficult part is going to be finding the bulbs.

Spring Showers - great for flowers, not the soda route

It is raining again. Wow. This seems like a lot of rain for Texas. Hopefully we will get a lot of flowers with all of these spring rains. The weather has really put some of my vending plans on hold.

I still haven't had a chance to get the light bulbs and ballasts replaced on my soda machines. I still need to do some spring cleaning on the machines and spruce them and the cages up a bit.

I finally let the kids out to help me with our soda route on Friday. It was a beautiful day. They had a blast, especially since I busted a soda. The only time they get to drink soda is if I bust one open. When they hear the can drop they get excited. When they hear the spraying sound, they get overjoyed. Now that it is warmer, I can move Dustin to my back instead of bundled up in my jacket on the front. This is a really good thing since he weighed 18 pounds at his 4 month checkup.

Soda vending in the snow

The soda vending business is down this year. We are having a lot of cold weather. I cannot believe how much snow we have had. It was supposed to snow today, but it seems to be staying to the south.

It has been so cold that I haven't gotten to do any of my vending machine maintenance yet. It has to be above 40 degrees before I can touch up the paint on the cages and other things.

The kids have been learning to stay quite and sit in the van. Many of the locations that I have I can pull right next to the soda machine. I have decided to leave the four kids in the van while I fill the machines because it has been so cold. They do not complain at all. My children to not like being cold. They have been helping me more at home counting the money and things like that.

Isn't there a famous saying somewhere "This too will pass."

I finally figured out what was wrong with the machine that would not vend properly. The cradle (actually it is called a rotor) got bent last September when a can jammed in it. It had been bent a previous time and we had just straightened it out. I decided to replace the cradle to keep it from jamming the whole machine. We got a cradle that looked like the old one, but when we installed it, it would vend one can, two cans and zero cans, instead of one can each time. I thought it was the motor, but the motor was fine. I tried everything I could think of, including bending the stops on the motor's brakes. It didn't work. Finally, the other day, I had a chance to go without any of the kids. I emptied the row right next to the broken row. When I did that, I realized that the cradle was just slightly different than the other ones. It would never work. It would always overshoot on two of the vends and drop the wrong number of cans. I decided to set that column to 2 cans deep instead of 3 cans deep. Then I changed the selection to Diet Pepsi because the office people requested a diet soda. So now all of the columns are vending and I didn't have to purchase a new cradle. I am so happy that I got that machine fixed.

More Cold Weather

North Texas is expecting more cold weather. This winter has been much colder than the last several winters. That means that the soda vending business is down. I was hoping to spruce up my machines and cages soon, but I guess that will have to wait a little while longer. Since I have several machines located outside, I spend as little time at them as possible when it is cold. I need to touch up the paint on the cages and on the machines before the spring and warm weather gets here. I also need to replace light bulbs in most of my machines. That requires a trip to the other side of town. One of my machines needs a ballast replaced. I will have to do a little research before I can tackle that project. There still is another month or two for me to get some of the maintenance done.

I need to teach the kids how to clean the machine while I am filling it. That would be really helpful. Trevor loves spraying the cleaner on the machine, but he isn't real good about wiping it off. The kids do help me clean up the trash. Slowly I am trying to teach them more things that they can do to help. It is great to have the ability to take them with me.

Progress

I have made progress on the records for my soda business. I now have recorded all of my sales and expenses for 2009. That is a huge relief. It was a daunting task to catch up on two months worth of records. The good news is that I did make money this year, the bad news is my husband was hoping that we would pay ourselves back for the first 4 machines that we purchased. The business is self-supporting. I even have enough in the account for the purchase of my next machine as soon as the location becomes available. I have set up an automatic transfer from our business account to our savings account to pay us back. If everything works properly, we should have our savings account paid back by the end of the year.

I need to get my 2010 records started. I also have some ideas about different year over year comparisons that I would like to do that will let me see more how each machine is performing over the long term. Right now, I just have everything based over the life of the machine. There is still a lot of work to do, but I have made progress.

New Year's Resolutions

The New Year is here. Can you believe that it is 2010 already? I remember when I was in grade school thinking that it would be forever before the year 2000 arrived. We are in a new decade. That is just unbelievable. I guess that time stops for no one.

It has been a long time since I updated my blog. I did not realize how hard it would be to get all four children to sleep and me awake. I am so far behind on many things. I have not kept up my books for about as long as I haven't updated my blog. I dread trying to get everything recorded. I keep meticulous records about what sold in which machine, how much I loaded, where I bought soda, how many miles I have put on my van related to my business, and so forth. I have a large stack of log papers for each of my machines that I need to input into my excel file. I know that the business is doing fine because my bank account is growing, but I hate not knowing exactly what is going on. I miss my charts that tell me how the sales are going. I haven't done my monthly household budget for 3 months either. That is also bothering me.

The good news is that Dustin is 10 weeks old. He is starting to sleep reasonably at night and take predictable naps during the day. I am getting more energy and don't need my afternoon nap as much. Dustin is becoming a little chunky guy. When I wear him and lift soda cases my back gets a workout. I will find out exactly how much he weighs next week, but according to my mother's scale, he is pushing 14 pounds. He eats all of the time. I usually have to feed him in the van when we are running our soda route. Right now I have to wear him on the front. It will get easier when I can wear him in the back. I will try to get a picture of us so that you can see it is possible to wear a baby and fill soda machines.

With the new year comes new year's resolutions. I thought this would be a good time to make plans for my business. It is wise to plan and have goals. I have several ideas that I want to try this year, including a give-away game. I am trying to work out the details and get it implemented. I will post the results and details. I would like to expand my operations by 2-4 machines. I have a new machine that is supposed to go into a location in the next few weeks. I am reading more books on guerrilla marketing. I am looking forward to this year in the soda business. I want to be able to keep my plans on track, so I won't call them resolutions. I always seem to break my resolutions. One resolution that I hope I don't break is updating my blog more often. I can't believe that it has been a month and a half.