I work in a store with one of these machines and i’ve seen the invoices. This is absolutely true. There is no way for the business to lose money on these things.
Comment on soda
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
Incidentally, the soda (gas-injected water plus syrup) is so cheap this would be better tolerated as a photo op and free advertising. When you get a fast food cup and free refills, the cup is literally more expensive than the soda + ice that goes into it. It’s nearly 100% profit.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
LePoisson@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Incidentally, the soda (gas-injected water plus syrup) is so cheap this [a real boy really named Peyton coming in and filling his bin for the fill-your-own-cup-special] would be better indulged and tolerated as a photo op and free advertising
What do you think this is?
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
No. The loss from ridiculous misuse is small but meaningful and basically worth nothing because typically “exposure” isn’t worth anything whatsoever. Worse it might convince some other assholes with the same strategy to specifically target your joint magnifying their loss.
It’s funny that you who have run nothing know better than every company.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I’ve run nothing, but a friend of mine was a Pizza Inn manager and talked a bit about it, albeit in the late 80s / early 90s.
But the attitudes I’ve seen from managers suggests at an anecdotal level they don’t know that much and don’t care. They penny pinch in the wrong places, often developing the reputation that their own establishment has mean, miserly policies. Maybe, if their margins are that low, like it’s Walmart, this is necessary.
Still, there’s a lot of focus by companies on loss control than there is by making their places welcome enough to bother shopping there; this figures into the recent Walgreens franchise culling in San Francisco.
The focus of my own studies (as a game dev) had been about crunching in AAA game development, which is still done even though it has the opposite effect as tended (specifically, hurrying up production to meet a deadline). Managers of billion-dollar projects are willing to be stupid in the face of data-driven policy; the cruelty is sometimes the point. Among the convenience store managers I’ve encountered, they don’t look at or care about the data.
Believe what you need to believe, though.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
A 5 gallon bag o syrup costs around 50 - $100 depending on volume discounts and what part of the US. At a 5 to 1 ratio, that’s 30 gallons per bag. Assuming each cup is 12oz (they do put in a lot of ice usually) that’s 320 servings (assuming no spillage).
So it costs McDonalds or similar 15 - 30 cents per soda they sell in soda costs, and 7 cents for the cup. So assuming it’s still a dollar, that’s between 78 to 63% profit based on volume discount the specific place has with coca cola. So not really 100% profit, but still high. And no the cup doesn’t cost more, if that were ever true it was for a brief moment in history.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
1/5 syrup is a lot of syrup, and doesn’t track with Italian-style sodas.
I have heard that brand name syrups are often charged extra for a patent fee or something, much like the studios overcharging movie theaters since the 90s / aughts, forcing them to run entirely on concessions.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
The web in general is fucked, since most sites less than 3 years old are now entirely written by AI. :(