A recent Vox report highlighted Jamie Ibanez, a 19-year-old from the Dallas-Fort Worth area who operates a 25-machine, eight-location vending machine business called Vending Bites. The route does pretty well, and Ibanez enjoys his work… and so do others.
More than 290,000 YouTube subscribers (and counting) follow his journey. There, he regularly posts videos detailing his daily life and describing things your Average Joe doesn’t know about the vending business.
He told Vox that he makes $10,000 a month from the channel, about triple what he earns from the route itself. Ibanez started in 2018 after graduating high school. His plans were to go to real estate school, but he saw a YouTube video from someone who does the same thing he does now, and he was hooked. Two days later, he bought his first vending machine.
As to why he thinks his YouTube videos are popular, Ibanez said: “I really think it’s the money. The reason my channel grew is because my thumbnails were me holding a big wad of cash, and I was 18 years old with my own business. But a lot of other people say the videos are satisfying, watching a vending machine get restocked. Before the videos, nobody really knew how all of that worked.” Be sure to check out the full Q&A here.