Dedicated Beverage Routes

If you could remove canned and bottled beverages from all the remaining mixed product routes of your Antares vending business, the remaining mixed product routes would function efficiently with much lighter, smaller route vehicles. You will always find that beverages always account for most of the weight in a route vehicle. Without beverages, the remaining route vehicles would likely not require heavy duty springs, transmissions and double rear wheels. This can easily save operators more than $15,000 per vehicle in original cost.

Costs against savings

The smaller, lighter vehicles would consume less fuel, require lower maintenance costs, cost less to insure and they would incur lower excise and property tax costs. The operating cost savings over time could be even greater than the original vehicle cost savings.

Obviously, the dedicated beverage route will require heavy-duty vehicles. Antares operators should acquire trucks that are specifically designed to haul beverages.

Scheduling and productivity

The essence of route productivity is scheduling machines for service only after they have sold enough items to justify the cost of the service, and before they have sold out on the best selling products.

Since canned and bottled beverages are a non perishable product, on a dedicated beverage route, the Antares machines can be scheduled for service only after they have sold a predetermined percentage of their capacity, without reference to any other machine or product category at the location.

For example, if the Antares operator is willing to double-column the best selling product, then that means it would not be unreasonable for the operator to schedule beverage machines for service when 60 percent of the capacity has been sold.

When you improve the quality of your Antares vending operations, you will end happier employees. A route person enters the cargo area of a route truck as least 20 times per day, so it needs to be a comfortable place to work.

Removing beverage cases from a mixed product routes, and providing beverage specific vehicles for beverage routes will definitely improve the working conditions for both types of routes.