Structure of a Route Commission Program

A well conceived and well executed commission plan can provide many valuable benefits to an Antares vending operator. Operators need to approach a commission program cautiously and with realistic expectations.

One of the most important benefits that an Antares operator can expect from a route commission program is an attitude adjustment on the part of the employee. When the employee is paid a straight hourly rate, or a weekly salary, his attitude toward his employer is at best, mildly adversarial.

Human nature suggests that he would want to earn as much as possible doing the least amount of productive work possible. He can be instinctively suspicious of any management initiative that is designed to improve productivity because he knows it will require more work on his part, with no more pay.

What’s in it for him?

Under a commission system, the employee will willingly cooperate with and support management initiatives if he understands that he will participate in the benefits, financially. This will produce a much healthier environment for the Antares operator to restructure and reschedule routes, to set up dedicated product routes, to introduce category management or even to institute price increases.

An additional benefit of a route commission system is the fact that management can easily quantify the route labor cost when they bid new business.

Commission can bring unequal pay

Another problem Antares operators complain about is the fact that commission systems that are based upon a flat percentage, applied to total route sales, produce some inequities in driver compensation. This can be caused by the fact that certain product categories yield higher route sales than other products.

Vary commission rate by category

In a company that runs mixed routes, you will find that those routes that are overloaded with beverage machines will gross more dollars and therefore earn higher commissions than the routes that are overloaded with snack and candy machines. This can easily happen in your Antares vending business, since here you will be running a mixed route.

This problem can be cured by paying commission rates that vary by product category. In the example quoted above, the routes would balance out if the beverage commission was half of the snack and candy commission. Think carefully about the structure of any route commission program that you can decide to implement, since you’re going to have to live with it for a long time.