40,000 RedBox kiosk exist in the United States.
150+ major retailers work with them.
288.5 million was the revenue in 2021.

RedBox is publicly traded and the company is currently valued at 362 million dollars.

My question though is why?

Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and more are all cheap.
YouTube & Amazon allows people to instantly rent any movie they want.
US Blu Ray sales have dropped over 30% in the last decade.

Every indicator would show RedBox is a pretty outdated technology which should have ended years ago, but is still around.

Curious why they are still a thing and did a little research for some answers.

First answer, they are barely hanging on.

40,000 RedBox kiosk’s, but the company itself made 288.5 million.

RedBox only averages $7,200 in yearly revenue per kiosk, which isn’t extremely high. Which to be fair, there’s splits with the stores and other factors taking away that revenue, but to have tens of thousands of large kiosks, most would guess revenue would be much higher.

The company also reported losses of 140 million dollars in 2021.

The reason they claimed was lack of new releases, due to market changes since COVID, where they have nothing new to rent people.

That excuse though doesn’t make a lot of sense.

RedBox made 546 million in 2020, despite movies also being paused heavily. They dropped nearly 50% in a year, where both streaming and theater viewing increased in 2021.

This shows RedBox might actually be only a couple years away from total collapse and this is sort of a survival business.

Second, lower income consumers.

74 million American’s have Netflix.
46 million have Disney+.
49 million have HBO Max or regular HBO.
83 million homes have cable.

Many homes have cable, streaming services and more, but there still are many people and families which can’t afford it.

RedBox while dollar wise not being as valuable as what the streaming services offer, it gives people a chance to watch something for only a couple of dollars easily.

This market again is shrinking, where more streaming services exist and people are adopting them faster, but there is a category of people which can’t afford to pay monthly and will choose an occasional rental.

Three, kiosk as a whole.

$400 a month is the average vending machine earnings.
$100 a month is the average for gumball/candy machines.

Those machines don’t make much, but tons of them are still found in large retailers all across the US.

RedBox, while they don’t make much still can earn comparably or out earn what other kiosks will produce for the stores.

From that point, they make sense to keep, where they serve as king to a series of machines that are just little added revenue.

Another perk for retailers is for the people who are committed to using RedBox, it is an easier draw to get people into a store.

Final thoughts

RedBox probably as a business doesn’t live to see 2030 in its current form.

It’s been a losing business for years, with a flat stock and is in a dying market, where if physical movies/shows make a comeback like vinyl, they’ll be via specialty stores and websites, versus kiosks at a Walmart.

That said though, due to existing locations, older/lower income consumers and stores not finding a better use for that space, they have a while.

The only point of survival might be a larger company buying them out, in an attempt to conver the 40,000 kiosk locations into something else.

That seems difficult though, where they’d have to spend to redo the machines and there’s no promise the stores would agree to change them or keep them.

All said and done, people should when seeing one take a good look, because they’ll probably be a thing of nostalgia eventually.