You should basically always be very suspicious when someone is trying to sell you a way to earn very attractive returns without a lot of risk or without time and effort intensive management. There is a lot of capital out there in the world looking for a return. If the returns really were so attractive on a risk-adjusted basis, and you could deploy a fair amount of capital without building a large organization and incurring a bunch of fixed operating expenses, why wouldn't someone who is a proven successful operator in that field just raise more capital themselves and keep more of the profits?

Even when the propositions look plausible on the surface, there is usually some hidden gotcha that prevents it from being scalable. For example, the economics only work if you can find a really good location that meets a bunch of requirements, and there simply aren't that many of those "good" locations left. Or it turns out that it requires very intensive management to deal with broken equipment, theft, vandalism, etc.

Slight off topic self rant: I tried this (dropshipping etc), went against all the good wisdom and rules of creating honest and passionate business. Failed miserably. Funny how brain works, I knew in 3 months that this is not honest, it feels spammy but then orders were coming in so I convinced myself that half the amazon products are doing the same thing. There is market for it then why should I not do this. This nagging voice in my head never went away and I paid for this later on. This matters when you have to work through night to get the marketing campaign out or you have double down the investment for certain product during holiday sale. Dealing with daily email of customers or tracking lost orders. I eventually lost energy and any sort of desire to grow my business. I was not making the kind of money I was promised by the field of dropshipping without adding way more money in spamy marketing and I had not passion to sell the product I Was selling. Certain folks who seems to be making 1m rev per year are also pivoting through spammy products every month and just dumping 100s and 1000s of dollars in facebook ads. It is more of a spammy marketing game then implementing any sort of creative or intellectual skillset. If anyone is thinking of doing this then I would encourage or first figure out how attached you are to money and the work you are doing. I was pulled into this because I thought I am smarter than rest and I can crack this because of my skills in technology and design so I dont to pay anyone to setup website, taxes, marketing etc however I missed out on how much soulless you have to be to run such a business. I dont mean soulless as a bad thing here, if you are robot or a you can setup a bot to do this then by all means try it but I just could not. This had a double impact on my life. Not only I failed to make money, wasted time but I also hate myself of even getting stuck into this. Lost my confidence and self respect which probably was unfounded anyway. Only thing I can tell myself is that hopefully this lifted some sort of delusion I had about myself and I learn and become better at life through this.

In London, we had I-Plus Kiosks, a long forgotten waste of money. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3058209.stm (2003) and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1691434.stm (2001) . IIRC, the council thought it'd be a good use of taxpayer's money.

I had a viceral "oh no, did I just install a virus" feeling when I visited that website, haha. I guess those memories die hard.

In the mid 90's I knew a guy with a few soda machines. I recall him saying he would buy soda from Costco and made about 8-10k/yr from each machine. The machines were about 2k each. I think he had 4 machines for about 40k/yr passive revenue.

I already know of dividends, but besides that and interest, I don't really know of many others.

Would love to hear some ideas for passive income that you have encountered and have experienced.

> Ah, but people with turnkey, profitable businesses don't tend to sell them.

> Something is up.

Who would have thought?

Place the vending machines/pay phones inside other locations...train stations, etc.

Fun thing with payphones - at least in Australia -- Telstra is investing in upgrading them (at least the ones in the cities). They aren't very useful as phones - but they are incredibly well situated billboards that you can plaster ads on top of.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/first-came-the-giant-adv...

...Don't ask! https://youtube.com/watch?v=ITfQGEASYvU