My wife bought 10 of these machines over a year ago. Uturn put the hard sell on her to do at least 30, but thankfully, I talked her out of that. She flew to Idaho and took the course provided by the company. The machines arrived a week later. Total cost, including shipping, but not the trip to Idaho: around $11,000. Here are our thoughts, a year later:
- You can buy the machines on EBay all day long for $100 each, new. That tells you all you need to know about the machines and the business.
- Average gross monthly revenue per machine is around $40 and that is after several of them have been placed two or three times
- The locators are generally worth what you pay for, around $50 a pop. There is no science to what they are doing. They use the yellow pages and will place your machines anywhere that will take them. We learned very quickly to check out the place before we agreed to accept the location. Originally, we placed machines in 2,000 sf coffee shops that generated around $10 per month.
- Uturn will regale with tales of vendors making upwards of $100 or even $200 per month on these machines. Complete and absolute BS. You will average around $40 per month and that is after you have "re placed" most of the machines during the first year.
- The notion that you don't have to split your revenues with the store owners is also false. All of them want something, eventually. Several start out by asking for 50%. One guy even locked up the machine until we agreed either to remove it or pay him, AFTER he agreed to let us place it in his store.
- The machines are heavy and too cumbersome for a woman to handle. They are also too big for most of the venues. We can't tell you how many times we arrived at a location and the store owner waived us off because the machine was too big. They're also cheaply built.
- The follow up customer service is non-existant. The sales team is transient and the work environment must be a boiler room. They are there to sell, sell, sell and they really don't care what they say in order to achieve their sales. Their response to our complaints ranged from "I never said that" to "he's not here anymore" to eventually not returning the calls at all.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from these guys. Bad news, bad investment. Go to EBay and Craigslist and check out the number of people dumping these machines.
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