Three things sit between the case and the coil
A $20.64 case of twenty-four is 86 cents a unit and that is where most people stop. Then there is the trip: $62 of fuel, vehicle and hours divided over the 900 units it brings back, which is 6.89 cents on every one of them regardless of what it cost. Then the prekit, fourteen minutes per hundred units at $26 an hour, which is another 6.07 cents. That is 99 cents landed before anything has gone wrong.
Then the gross-up. If 4.3 percent of units never sell — jammed, crushed, refunded, pulled at a date — the ones that do sell have to carry the cost of the ones that do not, so the landed figure is divided by 0.957 rather than having 4.3 percent added to it. That takes the cola to $1.03 delivered against 86 cents in the case, a gap of twenty percent. The division matters more the worse the losses get: at fifteen percent, dividing gives 17.6 percent more and adding gives fifteen, and the difference is money nobody was accounting for.
The percentage column lies about which lines matter
Run the defaults and the water leads on margin percentage at 67.3 percent — a cheap case, a $1.50 price, very little cost. It is third on money. The cola is last but one on percentage at 48.3 and first on money at $29.95 a week, and the energy drink is dead last on percentage at 46 and second on money at $26.24. The two columns are close to reversed, which is the ordinary shape of a machine and the ordinary reason the percentage column is the wrong one to review by.
A column is a fixed amount of space. Space earns per week. The only question a selection review is actually asking is which line earns the most per week per column, and margin percentage is not that number, is not proportional to that number, and frequently ranks in the opposite order.
A quarter is bigger than a price rise
Suppose case costs go up eight percent. On the cola that moves the delivered cost from $1.03 to $1.11, so holding the margin needs a price of $2.07. The changer takes quarters and the ladder moves in quarters, so the choices are $2.00 and absorb it or $2.25 and take 18 cents more than the rise required. There is no $2.07.
Across a machine those overshoots do not cancel neatly. On the default list every one of the seven lines rounds up, and the total overshoot is $18.87 a week — more than the case rise itself asked for. A route running quarter steps effectively reprices in jumps of twelve to twenty percent whatever the underlying cost did, and the sensible response is usually to move some lines and hold others rather than to reprice the whole machine at once. Which ones move first is a judgement about the location, and the arithmetic here only tells you how much each one is asking for.
The write-off percentage this page asks for is not a guess if you work it out: the date code write-off calculator derives it from the date on the pack, your pull rule and the fill depth. And the delivered cost that comes out of here is the input the location commission and payback calculator wants as its cost of goods share, and the number the cashless fee per vend calculator subtracts alongside the processor charges.
Where the averages break
The trip is spread evenly per unit, and a van does not work that way. Twenty-four bottles of water take a lot more of the load than twenty-four candy bars, and the water is the cheaper item, so the even split makes it look better than it is. If your mix is heavy on drinks, split the trip by case volume instead and expect the cheap bulky lines to lose several cents each. The page does not do that split because it would need case dimensions for every line, and the honest version of a simplification is to name it rather than to hide it.
Questions people ask
What does a vend actually cost once everything is counted?
On the defaults, an 86 cent case unit becomes 98.96 cents landed after the buying trip and the prekit, and $1.03 delivered once the units that never sell are carried by the ones that do. That is a twenty percent gap between the case price and the real number, and it lands hardest on cheap items: the same 12.96 cents of trip and prekit sits on a 34 cent bottle of water as on a $1.42 energy drink.
Should shrink be added to the cost or divided out of it?
Divided. If four units in a hundred never sell, the remaining ninety-six carry the cost of all hundred, so the multiplier is one over 0.96, which is 1.0417, not 1.04. At small rates the difference is trivial and at large ones it is not: fifteen percent lost means 17.6 percent more cost per unit sold, and a line that jams regularly is well into that territory.
Which selection should get the extra column?
The one earning the most margin per week, not the one with the best margin percentage. A column is fixed space and space earns per week. A sixty percent line selling three a week earns less than a forty percent line selling thirty, and the page prints both rankings side by side because on most machines they disagree at the top.
How much should prices rise when case costs go up?
Enough to cover the change in delivered cost, which is the case rise divided by the units per case and then grossed up for loss — not the case rise as a percentage of the vend price. Then the answer has to land on a step your changer can make. A quarter-step ladder cannot express a seven cent increase, so each line either absorbs it or overshoots, and the page totals both so the choice is made on numbers rather than on feel.