Vape Machine Adds Pokemon and Mystery. Revenue Doubled.
Vape Machine Adds Pokémon and Mystery. Revenue Doubled.
Case Study 1: Erie and Vine cleaned us out of Pokemon packs
A few months ago we dropped Pokémon Trading Card Game booster packs into one of our vending machines on a hunch. The machine sits inside Erie and Vine, a hipster dive bar in Willoughby, Ohio. We figured a few packs would move. The bar cleaned us out.
What happened at the bar
The machine sold nine Vivid Voltage packs at $23.65 each across the back half of April and then sold completely out. For a single set in a single bar, that pace caught us off guard.
Here is the part that grabbed us. We pulled the timestamps, and almost every sale landed after 6 PM, with two coming in after midnight. This is not a daytime product. It is a nightlife product.
This is the VTM Vending mobile app showing the aisle configuration for the Erie and Vine machine, including mystery products and Pokemon booster packs loaded right into the vape vending machine.
Why the bar crowd buys
The why is simple once you see it. The people at a bar like Erie and Vine are in their late twenties and thirties, and they grew up on these cards. Add a couple of drinks and the social energy of a packed room, and ripping a $25 pack with your friends becomes the best two minutes of the night.
Nostalgia is the real product. The cards are just how it gets delivered, and a late-night bar is the perfect room to deliver it in.
Then We Added Mystery Packs. Same Story.
Pokemon packs proved the model, so we loaded mystery products into the same bar machines next: Bag of Dicks, What The Actual F*ck, 90s mystery items, weird earrings, drinking games. Same impulse mechanics, same crowd, same result. The bar sold out.
The receipts tell the story. In July 2026 alone, VTM machines delivered 204 mystery vends across 19 bar placements, $2,843 in gross revenue at an average of $13.94 a pull.
What The Actual F*ck was the top seller with mystery vapes and earrings close behind, 62% of it sold between 9 PM and 3 AM, and Friday through Sunday carried 68% of the volume.
This is a nightlife product, and the vend log proves it.
The mystery line runs through the same 22mm machines, the same Nayax reader, and the same VMS dashboard as the Pokemon packs, so a bar machine can carry both: card packs for the collectors, mystery bags for the party crowd, vapes for everyone else. One machine, three impulse categories, zero extra hardware. The full program, product lineup, and wholesale details live on the Mystery Vending page.
Mystery Pack Gallery
What The Actual F*ck
Freaks Only
Bag of Dicks
90s Mystery
Rare Pokemon
Weird Earrings
Case Study 2: 1899 Pub Went Bigger. More Aisles, More Products, More Revenue.
1899 Pub, a neighborhood bar in Willoughby, Ohio, ran the compact Slim Wall first, then upgraded to the Slim Tower 2.0 at the end of April. May revenue hit $5,120, a 20%+ increase in a single month.
The jump was not just capacity. Upgrading to the Slim Tower 2.0 meant more aisles, more SKUs, and more variety in front of the crowd, 24 aisles where the compact Slim Wall had far fewer. It also added a wow factor: the 43 inch LCD touchscreen and LED lighting make the machine impossible to miss from across the bar, especially on themed nights when the glowing display draws natural attention. More variety meant higher ticket averages and more foot traffic around the machine. Their top sellers stayed vape and nicotine pouch heavy: Breeze Spearmint, Breeze Raspberry Lemon, Geek Bar Pulse Miami Mint, Alp Chillen Mint 6mg, and Breeze Blueberry Watermelon. Even with all of that running, the 24-aisle configuration had room to spare for seasonal additions.
That spare capacity is the whole point for a bar operator. With the Slim Tower 2.0 you are not choosing between categories. The same tower vending vapes and nicotine pouches can dedicate aisles to Pokemon card packs, mystery bags, and other nightlife vending products, the exact mix this article tested. More choices meant more sales at 1899 Pub, and the full case data above is what that looks like in a real venue.
This is the VTM Vending mobile app showing the aisle configuration at 1899 Pub, just like the Erie and Vine screen above, with mystery products priced and stocked per aisle and refilled remotely. Swapping a slow aisle for a new SKU takes seconds, which is how a 24 aisle machine keeps the menu fresh week after week.
Case Study 3: Jude's Sports Page doubled its machine revenue
Jude's Sports Page Tavern is a neighborhood sports bar in Bainbridge Township, Ohio, rated 4.6 stars across 149 reviews and open until 2:30 AM. It has the kind of loyal late crowd this whole article is about, and it just became the second bar to prove the product mix playbook with real settled transaction data.
The situation
The machine at Jude's had a solid, dependable vape and nicotine pouch business turning roughly $26 a day, consistently, week after week. Total machine revenue averaged $28.52 per day on 1.14 sales per day. Steady, predictable, and flat.
The change
On August 11 the operator added Pokemon card packs and mystery items alongside the existing lineup. No new hardware. No new location. No price changes to anything already selling. Same machine, same bar, two new categories the late crowd was already looking for.
The result
Daily revenue climbed from $28.52 to $58.68. The vape and pouch sales held right where they were, and the entire gain came from people who had not been buying at all.
| Category | Before (per day) | After (per day) |
|---|---|---|
| Vapes and nicotine pouches | $25.76 | $25.74 |
| Pokemon card packs | Not stocked | $16.20 |
| Mystery items | Not stocked | $16.74 |
| Total machine revenue | $28.52 | $58.68 |
Look at the before and after columns for vapes and nicotine pouches: $25.76 a day before the change, $25.74 after. The existing business held completely steady. Pokemon packs and mystery items did not cannibalize a single sale. They stacked $32.94 a day of brand new revenue on top of it, sold to an entirely new set of customers.
The live sales feed in the VTM operator app tells the same story vend by vend: mystery enamel pins, Lucy Breakers nicotine pouches, and Pokemon Sword and Shield Battle Styles packs delivering back to back at Jude's, with three Pokemon pack vends landing in a single late night stretch. And the timing matches the 1899 Pub and Erie and Vine stories above: 72% of all sales land between 8 PM and 2 AM, when the bar is fullest. This is a nightlife product, and the same machine that carries vapes and pouches can carry it without giving anything up.
The vape and pouch customers kept buying exactly as before. The Pokemon and mystery buyers were an entirely new set of customers walking past a machine that used to have nothing for them.
Figures are actual settled transactions from a single VTM Vending machine, May 17 to August 22, 2026, measured against the full product mix change on August 11. Individual results vary by location, traffic, and product selection.
Update, August 27: mystery packs and Pokemon Pitch Black are selling out overnight
Two weeks after the product mix change, here is the raw sales feed from the same machine. Eight vends landed between 8:12 PM and 1:47 AM in a single overnight stretch: four mystery packs at $11.88, a Bag of Dicks mystery at $12.96, two Pokemon Pitch Black in protective cases at $16.20 each, and a Sword and Shield Battle Styles pack in case at $21.60. That is $114.48 through one machine in roughly five and a half hours.
Every one of those eight reads Delivered, and every one landed after 8 PM. Five were mystery products and three were Pokemon, which is the mix working exactly as intended: the cheap impulse buy pulls people to the machine and the card packs carry the ticket. Pitch Black was the newest set added to the aisle, and it sold twice in the same night.
Three bars, one pattern
Three different bars, three different machines, one identical result. Erie and Vine proved the demand: nine Vivid Voltage packs at $23.65 each sold out in under a month, adding roughly $150 a month on a machine that was already paying its way. 1899 Pub proved the upgrade path: more aisles, more SKUs, more variety, plus the 43 inch LCD touchscreen and LED lighting of the Slim Tower 2.0, and sales jumped 20%+ to $5,120 in a single month. Jude's Sports Page proved the revenue is truly incremental: daily revenue climbed 106% while the existing vape and pouch business held within two cents of where it was.
The clock tells the same story at every location. Eight of the nine Pokemon sales at Erie and Vine landed in the evening or after midnight. 62% of the network's mystery vends land between 9 PM and 3 AM. 72% of all sales at Jude's land between 8 PM and 2 AM. This is a nightlife product, and it runs through the same 22mm machines, the same Nayax reader, and the same VTM Software dashboard as the vapes and pouches that anchor the machine.
The pattern in one sentence: put nostalgia and impulse products in front of a packed late-night room, and they sell without taking a single sale away from what the machine already does.
What it means for operators
Packs run $20 to $30 depending on the set, and at this location the trading card add-on is putting roughly $150 a month per machine on top of products that were already paying their way.
No new floor space.
No second machine.
Just a different SKU in the rows.
Read the Complete Operator's Guide
Â
If you run vending and you have a bar account, trading cards are the easiest test you will run all year.
Why VapeTM Became VTM Vending
VTM Vending built the first VapeTM machine, a name that played on the ATM because that is exactly how it reads to a customer standing in front of it. Tap, verify, vend. The concept worked. What we did not anticipate was how quickly operators would outgrow the single category the machine was named for.
Disposable vapes and nicotine pouches like Zyn proved the model. Then operators started testing what else sells at 11 p.m. in a bar, a music venue, or nightclub. Mystery items and Pokemon booster packs generated significant revenue and carried healthy margins, 30 to 50 percent. This increased profitability and created opportunity in heavily regulated jurisdictions, since these products did not sit under the same regulatory microscope as nicotine or vapes.
That is why VapeTM became VTM Vending. The hardware was never limited to vape, and the name should not have been either.
Convert your VapeTM to a nightlife hybrid: vape, nicotine pouches, mystery products, and Pokemon in one machine.
Contact SalesShop MachinesFrequently asked questions
Do Pokemon cards sell well in nightlife locations like bars and clubs?
Yes, absolutely. Mystery products and Pokemon booster packs are crushing it in nightlife venues, including bars and dive bars. Erie and Vine, 1899 Pub, and Jude's Sports Page Tavern are a few recent case studies on this page showing huge increases in revenue and profit after adding mystery products and Pokemon cards.
Do mystery products sell well in nightlife vending machines?
Yes. In July 2026 alone, VTM machines delivered 204 mystery vends across 19 bar placements, $2,843 in gross revenue at an average of $13.94 a pull, with 62% sold between 9 PM and 3 AM. At Jude's Sports Page Tavern, mystery items added $16.74 a day as soon as they went into the machine. Top sellers include What The Actual F*ck, Freaks Only, and Bag of Dicks.
Do customers need to scan their ID to buy a mystery product?
No. If your machine has age verification enabled, you can set the age requirement to 0 for a specific aisle, and the machine will not prompt the customer to scan their ID for that product. Age gating stays on for the vape and nicotine pouch aisles while Pokemon packs and mystery items vend without the extra step.
How much extra money can Pokémon packs add to a vending machine?
At our Erie and Vine location the trading card add-on is running roughly $150 a month per machine, with packs priced between $20 and $30. That one machine produced about $213 from a single set in April before it sold out. At Jude's Sports Page Tavern the effect was bigger: adding Pokemon packs and mystery items on August 11 took the machine from $28.52 to $58.68 a day, a 106% jump, with Pokemon packs alone contributing $16.20 a day while the existing vape and pouch sales held steady.
Third-Party Trademark Disclaimer: All trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, emblems, icons, images, business names, company names, brand names, and product names appearing, displayed, or referenced on this website are the property of their respective owners. VTM Vending makes no claim of ownership over any third-party trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, emblems, icons, images, business names, company names, brand names, and product names appearing, displayed, or referenced on this website. VTM Vending is not affiliated with, related to, sponsored by, endorsed by, or otherwise connected to any third-party trademark owner, unless expressly stated. Their use does not imply any affiliation, connection or relationship with, endorsement by, sponsorship of, or approval by the respective trademark owners, unless expressly stated otherwise. Any such trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, emblems, icons, images, business names, company names, brand names, and product names appearing, displayed, or referenced on this website are used solely for purposes of identification, description, commentary, comparison, and/or reference. Nothing on this website should be construed as granting, by implication, estoppel, or otherwise, any license or right to use any third-party trademark without the prior written permission of its respective owner. If you believe that any material on this website improperly uses a trademark that you own or represent, please contact us with relevant details, and we will review the matter promptly. VTM Vending manufactures and sells vending hardware and accessories only, and does not brand, label, or represent its machines as Pokemon-branded or officially licensed machines.
2 comments
Mystery Packs and Pokemon Pitch Black Are Selling Out Overnight at Jude’s
A few days ago we swapped two vape slots at Jude’s Sports Page Tavern in Bainbridge Township for something new: mystery packs and Pokemon cards. That was the whole change. Same machine, same wall, same prices on everything else. We just gave up two aisles to see what would happen.
Last night that machine did $114.48 in about five and a half hours. Four mystery packs at $11.88. A Bag of Dicks mystery at $12.96. Two Pokemon Pitch Black packs in protective cases at $16.20 each. And a Sword and Shield Battle Styles pack at $21.60. Eight vends, every one marked delivered, and every single one after 8 PM.
That last detail is the part worth paying attention to. Five of the eight were mystery products, three were Pokemon, and it’s the same thing we watched happen at Erie and Vine and at 1899 Pub. The cheap impulse item is what gets somebody off their barstool and over to the machine. The card packs are what make the night worth it. Pitch Black was the newest set we loaded, and it sold twice before closing time.
Here’s the simple version. If your machine in a bar only sells nicotine, get Pokemon and Mystery products added. Game Changer.
Currently have 4 machines active. looking to buy the mystery bags wholesale.