A 150-person warehouse is a genuinely different problem from a 150-person office. Everyone breaks at the same time, nobody can leave the building, and demand arrives in three sharp spikes a day with near silence between them.
The throughput problem
In an office, people trickle past a machine across eight hours. In a warehouse, a whole shift gets fifteen minutes at once. A traditional vend cycle takes ten to fifteen seconds, so a single spiral machine simply cannot serve a large break at all — people queue, give up, and stop trying. Sales flatline and everyone concludes vending doesn't work at that site.
The actual problem was never demand. It was how many people could be served before the break ended.
A cooler where you open a door and take what you want moves several times the people a coil machine does in the same fifteen minutes.
Sizing by shift
| People per shift | Typical setup |
|---|---|
| 50–100 | One cooler, or a drink machine plus snacks |
| 100–200 | A smart cooler alongside a traditional machine |
| 200–400 | Multiple units, split between break room and floor entrance |
| 400+ | A bank of coolers or a micro market rather than vending |
Split the placement
If everything sits in the break room, everything queues in the break room. A second unit near the floor entrance or the time clock spreads the load and catches people arriving and leaving. Walk the route your crew takes from their station to break, and put equipment on that line — a unit forty feet off the path may as well be in another building when someone has twelve minutes left.
Night shift is the argument
If you run second or third shift, those employees have nothing open nearby. Night shift frequently out-sells day shift per head for exactly that reason, and it's often what makes a site work that looked borderline on day numbers alone.
Texas summers change the maths. Drink volume in a Waco warehouse can climb sharply between May and September. A restock schedule set in February leaves you empty in July, so service frequency has to move with the season.
What sells on a warehouse floor
- Cold drinks dominate, especially in facilities without conditioned air.
- Energy drinks over-index heavily versus offices, particularly on early and night shifts.
- Bottled water moves in real volume, and is exempt from Texas sales tax, which keeps the price down.
- Substantial food — sandwiches, burritos, protein — sells where a coil machine can't hold it.
Vending is not a substitute for the drinking water you provide your crew. It sits alongside it, for the people who want something cold, something with electrolytes, or something that isn't water.
What to tell us
- Headcount per shift, and how many shifts you run
- Break times and how long they are
- Whether there's a 120V outlet near the break area on a circuit with room
- Whether drivers wait on site — that's often a second audience worth its own unit
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