Every ATM on earth runs the same software, dispenses the same twenties and charges roughly the same fee. So why does one machine get used ten times a day while an identical one across town collects dust? Because the machine is not the business. The spot is. If I were starting an ATM route today, I would spend almost all of my early energy on one question: where does paper money still change hands, and why?
I learned a version of this with vending. I wrote about it in why the right vending machine locations make all the difference, and the lesson carries over almost word for word. Hardware is a commodity. Location is the asset. ATMs just make the lesson sharper, because the thing you are selling (access to cash) is something fewer people need every year.
Cash didn’t vanish. It moved into pockets of the economy.
Here’s the national picture, and it is not flattering to ATMs. The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found that cash made up about 13% of consumer payments, around six out of 47 payments a month. The year before it was 14% and seven. That is a slow slide, not a cliff, and the same survey says 90% of people plan to keep using cash in some form.
But averages hide the interesting part. Cash use is lumpy. The Fed found rural consumers made about nine cash payments a month versus six in cities and suburbs. Lower-income households and people over 55 rely on it more. The FDIC’s 2023 household survey found about 4.2% of U.S. households have no bank account at all, and roughly two-thirds of those households run entirely on cash.
So the question is never “do people still use cash?” It is “where do the people who use cash spend their evenings and weekends?” That is a map, and you can draw it.
The four reasons someone pulls cash
When I think about a location, I try to name the specific reason a customer would walk up to a machine and pay a few dollars for the privilege. If I can’t name one, I pass. Most good spots have at least two of these:
- The seller wants cash. A tattoo studio that adds a card fee, a barber whose chairs are cash-only, a bar with a $10 card minimum, a flea market vendor with no reader.
- The customer wants cash. Tips they want to hand over directly, privacy at a smoke shop, a budget they only trust in paper.
- The moment demands cash. A cover charge at the door at midnight. Quarters for a laundromat washer. A pool table.
- There’s nowhere else to get it. No bank branch within walking distance, or the nearest one closed hours ago.
That fourth one is the multiplier. A nightclub with a bank ATM next door is a weak site no matter how cash-heavy the crowd is, because people will walk twenty steps to save the fee. A county-road gas station with nothing for miles can quietly outperform it.
My Saturday-drive method
If I were building this, I would not start by calling anyone. I would start by looking. Here is the process I’d run, in order:
- Pick two or three adjacent ZIP codes close enough to service on one loop. Driving is the hidden cost of any route business.
- Pull every candidate business in those ZIPs: bars, pool halls, smoke shops, tattoo studios, convenience and liquor stores, laundromats, barbershops, small grocers, motels. VendBuddy (full disclosure: VendBuddy is my company) (vendbuddy.io/app) will pull those by ZIP along with the owner or manager’s contact, and you can buy a pack of credits once instead of signing up for a monthly plan. A spreadsheet and Google Maps also works; it just takes longer.
- Mark every free ATM on the map. Bank branches, credit unions, grocery-store machines. Draw a rough quarter-mile circle around each one. Anything inside a circle gets a lower grade.
- Drive the list at the right hour. A bar at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday tells you nothing about its Friday. Go when the place is actually busy. Look for card-minimum signs, cash-only signs, pool tables, tip jars, a line at the door.
- Grade each spot A, B or C and only pitch the A’s first.
The whole thing is a weekend of work. It’s the least glamorous part, and it decides almost everything that comes after.
How I’d rank the usual suspects
| Venue | My grade | The one-line reason |
|---|---|---|
| Neighborhood bar with pool tables | A | Covers, tips, card minimums, and people who stay for hours |
| Nightclub with a door charge | A (if no ATM nearby) | The cash need is built into walking in |
| Smoke or vape shop | A- | Customers who prefer paper for privacy and discounts |
| Tattoo studio | B+ | Big tickets, card fees, tipping |
| Rural gas station | B+ | Cash habits plus distance from banks |
| Independent corner store | B | Steady, but often has a competitor down the block |
| Coin laundromat | B- and falling | Great until the owner installs card readers |
| Office lobby or gym | C | Everyone there taps a phone |
These are judgment calls, not data points. The whole idea of grading is that you will be wrong sometimes, and the grades get better the more places you look at.
A hypothetical route, one spot at a time
Let me make it concrete with an illustrative example (a made-up person, not a reader or me). Luis has a day job and about $6,000 set aside for a side business. He runs the Saturday drive across three ZIPs and ends up with 11 A’s out of about 45 businesses.
His first yes is a laundromat, a B. Not his top pick, but the owner said yes fast and he wants to learn the loading rhythm. It does modestly. His second yes, three weeks later, is a bar with two pool tables and no bank within a mile, one of his A’s. That one does roughly three times the volume of the laundromat and, within a few months, is covering the costs of both machines.
From there it becomes a loop: the profits refill the cash he needs to stock machine three, which goes into a tattoo studio. Machine four lands at a smoke shop. By the end of the first year he pulls the laundromat machine, after its owner adds card readers to the washers, and moves it to a barbershop he graded B+. Five machines, one relocated, zero of them “passive.” But the Friday cash run now pays his car note, and the next machine pays a chunk of rent.
Nothing about that is a promise. It is the shape of how this usually goes: a slow start, one strong location that changes the math, and a habit of moving weak machines instead of hoping they improve.
The part people skip: saying no to spots
The hardest discipline in any location business is walking away from a yes. An owner who says “sure, put it in” at a place with a bank next door is not doing you a favor. You’ll carry the machine’s costs and your time for a site that was never going to work. I wrote about how location mistakes compound in the ugly truth about the vending machine business, and ATMs are less forgiving, because a bad ATM spot still makes you tie up cash in the box.
My rule would be simple: if I can’t name the reason someone pulls cash at this spot, and I can’t confirm there’s no free ATM nearby, the answer is no, no matter how friendly the owner is.
There’s a more hands-on companion to this piece on VendBuddy: Best Locations for ATM Machines: 12 Venues Ranked by Cash Demand. Start there if you’re already past the “should I” stage.
Why this is worth the effort at all
Honestly, an ATM route is not the business I’d tell most people to build their whole future on. Cash is shrinking and I don’t expect that to reverse. But I like what it teaches: how to find a location, how to read foot traffic, how to ask a stranger for a deal. Those skills transfer to vending, to rentals, to almost anything with a physical footprint. And I will keep saying it: never rely on just one job. Even a small route is a second leg to stand on.
If you want a next step, take one ZIP code this weekend and do the map exercise. Mark the banks, list the bars, drive it on a Friday night. You’ll know more about whether this business fits you after that drive than after reading ten more articles, including this one.
