Saw a post today about a girl being a “pet psychic” who is apparently super successful. Wondered what other examples are out there.
Saw a post today about a girl being a “pet psychic” who is apparently super successful. Wondered what other examples are out there.
Gumball machines. When I worked at Hollywood Video we had one of the big globe top ones with a clear base with a spiral ramp in it. A guy would come to take the quarters out and replace the gumballs, and he was always the happiest person about it. I was a miserable cunt to everyone because I hated my job, so I wanted to know his secret. It turns out the dude had no high school diploma or formal training in business, but he was a millionaire in the early 2000s on gumballs. He would drive down to a Mexico and get his gumballs for pennies and then turn around and flip them for 50c each to kids renting movies.
My buddy from high school didn’t know what to do with himself when he didn’t have the grades to get into college, he took the $1000 his parents gave him for college and bought a used vending machine and fixed it up… the last time I talked to him he owned like 40 of them and made a killing basically running to cosco every day, and ordering replacement parts for the odd vandalized machine…
I’m still wondering how many gumballs you’d need to flip to be making that kind of money. Was he traveling over the border with a semitrailer of gum?
All he did was collect money all day long. He had a whole network of gumball machines at every Hollywood Video, Blockbuster, and a lot of theaters. He just played his niche hard. He obviously had employees.
The gum ball entrepreneurs were the real victims of the streaming revolution.
You probably need a decent number of machines, and it probably takes a bit to get there - but I’d imagine each machine only needs to be collected once every few weeks. Own 500 machines, collect 20 a day, maybe $100 in each machine collected… suddenly you’re pulling in $10K/week on fucking penny gumballs.
You’d have to pay the location something. Why would a store owner let you take up floor space for free?
They pay rent for the space.
I mean… think about it. Let’s say your cost per gumball is 5 cents and you sell them for 50 cents. So 45 cents gross rev. For every 1000 you sell it’s $450. Get 20 of those going and it’s $9k/week or a bit over $450k/year.
Regular trips to Mexico with a cash business also sounds like the job description of a drug dealer
What kind of gumballs were those? Special flavors?
In the late 90s, I worked for an amusement company that had operated since the 1960s and had just opened their final boss status family fun center in my neighborhood. Got to know the family really well, was a keyholding manager etc.
A lot of their business was machines on location, video games/pinball, jukeboxes, pool tables. Got to know not only the history, but the real ins and outs of the business. Redemption was the real bread and butter of the center. The value of a ticket from a redemption game was $0.01 at retail. The items were bought from wholesalers and generally marked up 3x, candy much higher. If you wanted to save your tickets for that really cool beer stein that was 6,000, to us, that meant $60 but was bought for about $15. The average game paid out 4.3 tickets per game or about $0.009 in redemption power.