He had four soda-and-snack combo machines in service in the same area. He spent a few hours one day a week servicing and refilling the machines, plus bookkeeping and buying the concessions. All told he was probably pulling about $15 per hour he worked. He had other things besides Snickers — about 15 different items in four machines.

I think that the price he was looking for the route was probably reasonable. Judging by his “take” from a couple of the better-performing machines on the route it might have taken about a year and a half to pay it off, excluding time, if I had serviced the machines myself. If I paid someone $8 per machine per week to take care of them (or leased the route to them for $200/month and they keep everything they make), it would take longer, but if would take a lot less time.

The faster an investment pays off, the better, of course. I would like to have something of this size pay itself back in less than a year, but that’s getting it at a really good price, and he wasn’t pressed to sell it. He could afford to wait.