Vending Machines
As a kid growing up in the Fifties, I was always happy to see a vending machine. Not only did they contain candy and soda, but they were fun to work, like big mechanical toys. You put your coin in the slot, turned a crank or pushed a lever, and out popped the goods.
Each machine had its quirks. With the gumball machines, you had to cup your hand at the flap to keep the candy from rolling out onto the floor. The soda machines were usually bright red with a narrow glass door along one side. When you pushed down the hefty lever, there was a satisfying clunk, something shifted, and the entire stack of bottles was unlocked. You pulled out the one you wanted, and the locking mechanism sprang back on the rest. (I spent a fair amount of time trying to see if, by pulling two bottles at precisely the same moment, I could fool the machine. But I never could.) A rustic version, the ice-chest type, inhabited the dusty corners of country stores. The bottles sat upright in the bottom, locked into a metal track. With these, you had to reach down inside to get the soda, which, if you were a kid, meant your entire torso went into the machine’s refrigerated interior. You poked around in the wonderful coolness, clinking the bottles until you found the one you wanted and drew it up dripping, like a fish from a cold stream.
Even the opening of the bottle was a pleasing ritual. You angled the bottle’s top
into the teeth of the machine’s opener. There was the satisfying give of the thin metal cap, the hiss and pop of released gas, the tinkle of the cap falling into the receptacle below, followed by that first fizzy swig.
As the years went by, vending machines grew – even faster than me. A typical Fifties machine, the Vendo 65, was 4 feet 4 inches tall, 25 inches wide, 18-plus inches deep, and weighed a few hundred pounds. Today’s Cavalier C10-342 Multi-Paq is 6 feet 7 inches tall, 39 inches wide, 35 inches deep, and weighs 864 pounds – empty.
Despite their impressive size and flashy illuminated facades, the new machines are mechanically inscrutable and devoid of tactile pleasures. You press an oversize plastic button, hear some vague rattling, and the soda is expelled with a thud into a trough. Vending machine designers seemed to forget that mechanical interaction was part of the fun, that there was inherent appeal in turning cranks, seeing things move, extracting the cold soda.
At least the candy vending machines reveal their inner workings. With these, the candy walks the plank, shoved along by a twirling plastic spiral until it topples into the retrieval bin. Although it’s a versatile snack dispenser, the spiral lacks mechanical precision, and the snack sometimes stalls at the edge. At that point you have three options: Shake it loose (rarely works), buy two (which works but rewards the machine’s bad behavior), or leave your dangling treat for the next person (you feel cheated). A friendly machine would be one that allowed for just enough jiggling to correct such injustices.
Whatever their design flaws, the new vending machines have proved very adaptive, even invasive. Lit up for maximum visibility, they developed tough, weatherproof shells that allowed them to live outdoors in all seasons. They inched away from the gas station and the country store and found their way to ball fields and tennis clubs, firehouses and horse farms, high school hallways and college dorms. They often clustered in groups or mating pairs and sometimes got footholds in incongruous places: the porch of a quaint Victorian guesthouse in Ocean Grove, or next to a rustic stone barn on a country road in Warwick, N.Y.
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The vending machine has ancient origins. In A.D. 100, worshipers at Egyptian temples could purchase a squirt of sacred water from a stone dispenser. They dropped in a coin, which depressed a metal pan that in turn opened a valve, allowing water to flow out.
But it wasn’t until the birth of the machine age that the idea really caught on. By the 1880s, machines were dispensing postcards, books, and gum. By 1902, an entire restaurant – Horn & Hardart’s – was dispensing food from little, coin-controlled doors.
From this wholesome pinnacle, however, vending machines’ dark side emerged. They came to be associated almost exclusively with products that were either unhealthy, like cigarettes and junk food, or undesirable, like bad coffee. They were reputed to be in cahoots with mobsters.
Then people started turning up dead underneath them. It sounds like an urban legend, but it’s not. Since 1978, at least 35 people have been killed and more than 100 injured in vending machine accidents. A typical case was that of a 19-year-old college student who tried to tip a dormitory Coke machine to get a free soda. It fell over on him, crushing his ribs and asphyxiating him. Modern soda machines are top-heavy —the sodas are stored in the upper sections—and they tip with unexpected suddenness. Since the mid-1990s, most machines have displayed warning stickers to that effect, and anti-theft devices in new machines supposedly remove the incentive to tip them.
Also contributing to vending machines’ sometimes villainous reputation is the aggressive effort to get them into the public schools. It used to be against federal regulations for schools to sell soda to students, but the beverage industry sued to let machines do it. Now, with vending machines as the loophole, many school districts have become dependent on lucrative contracts with companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola. A debate rages nationwide over the appropriateness and morality of the soda connection. Protests have led some districts to void the contracts, even as others eagerly sign up.
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It’s hard not to anthropomorphize the vending machine. They stand upright and look a bit like the boxy robots of pre-“Star Wars” science fiction. Their design incorporates the personality features of a real-life salesman: fast-talking in their gaudy enticements, hard-headed in their inflexible procedures and prices, and wary in their concealed coin boxes.
We are compliant customers until something goes wrong. Who hasn’t slapped, kicked, or tried to tilt a vending machine that was withholding? Or tried to sweet-talk a machine into taking a wrinkly dollar bill it has twice rejected?
We may still be cleverer than vending machines, but they evolve faster. Today they routinely dispense milk, sandwiches, newspapers, soap, condoms, fresh squeezed orange juice, disposable cameras, books, and horoscopes. A machine for marinas and boat ramps delivers worms, minnows, shrimp, and tiny frogs. The sales literature promises “you can provide your fishing customers with fresh live bait while you’re still snug in bed.” A machine with a mahogany front and humidor technology sells $15 cigars. A retrofitted cigarette machine, the Art-o-Mat, sells poems, matchbox-size bronze sculpture, and other small-scale original art. The hottest breakthrough in vending machine technology? A French fry vending machine. After 15 years of tinkering (grease and smoke were a big problem), a company called Tasty Fries has begun manufacturing a machine that dispenses 32 hot fries in 90 seconds.
In Japan, where vending machines are said to consume as much power as a day’s output from three nuclear reactors, they sell just about anything except real estate: fresh flower arrangements, hot noodles, pagers and cellphones, beer and sake (timed to shut off at 11 p.m.), and, not to be outdone by the American bait machines: live stag and rhinoceros beetles (beetle-collecting is popular summer pastime for schoolchildren).
But the true brave new world of vending is epitomized by machines that offer an entire convenience store in a steel box. The Japanese have one called the Robo Shop. In Washington, D.C., there’s the Tiktok Easy Shop. Customers punch in their selections and a robotic arm cruises among some 200 shelved items, dropping them in a bin that transfers to a central receptacle. Customers pay by cash or credit card. Tiktok, named for the friendly mechanical man from the “Oz” books, is owned by the McDonald’s Corp. Passers-by stop to watch it in operation, a reminder that part of the appeal of vending machines has been their ability not just to vend but to entertain.
Now, if they just had a machine where the customers could operate the robotic arm – that would be something.
World by Design Column
2003
