with supply and demand and all… IM DEMANDING CANNED BREAD!! where’s the supply 🥺?
It replaces workers with robots so it would probably save money too.
I don’t trust vending machines anymore. I barely used them ever but over the years I got moldy food a couple times and a bunch of times the thing gets stuck and I end up not getting what I paid for. fool me once, shame on, shame on you… fool me, can’t get fooled again
I just realized that in something like 200 years, no one is really going to understand the difference between George Bush and George W Bush. Like, they’ll know they were two different people, but mis-attributing something that one Bush said to the other Bush will be seen as an easy mistake to make (much like how nowadays, John Adams and John Quincy Adams are seen as two different people but are not really that different in the average person’s eyes).
Like, there might be memes of 41 saying “…fool me -can’t get fooled again. Heheh” and no one will realize what’s wrong with the picture.
I just saw a book vending machine in an elementary school this weekend…I thought that was kind of cool.
Yeah we have those outside!
There are little free library boxes everywhere in my town!
Walmart and Amazon have expensive canned bread.
apparently people like it?
as for cool vending machines… gotta be cool to have cool vending machines.
Oh neat. I go through bread really slowly and often end up throwing a lot of it out whenever I buy some. That could work well for me.
Edit: that seems like expensive bread
Too much reliance on cars for transportation and commerce built around that. Compared to Japan; we don’t have the opportunity for vending machines except when we are contained to a location without the ability to go to a store that isn’t that “far”. We have a larger scale of living; a half hour drive is normal to us, but a half hour drive for other countries is at the tipping point of finding a place to stay for the night and a vending machine selling a common foodstuff makes sense.
If you were forced to walk everywhere and “corner stores” were infrequent, vending machines would be far more common and worthwhile for owners of those machines.
That is most likely the right answer.
I’m in Switzerland and we have vending machines (not as cool as the Japanese ones tho) because we walk past them everyday.
They are generally on the pavement near post offices, at train stations and other large public transportation places. For a time there was cigarettes vending machines near bars but I think those are now forbidden.
lol, I only know the selecta ones but I’ll try the wurstaumat next time I’m in the german part of the ruesti.
TBF I also felt Swiss people are much more trustworthy than most.
I even remember having going out for dinner and the person behind the counter asking what we ordered; seems like a lot of restaurant ordering systems don’t keep track of orders because you can trust people being honest when they re-state their order at the counter.
I’m from the Netherlands, also in a very walkable city (Utrecht), and students would vandalise vending machines if they existed!
Trust and respect are some of the core principles in Swiss education and society. There are those well known newspapers stands that always amaze tourists. They are not locked nor monitored but people still pay for the newspaper.
For the restaurants it can be true but most places will know what you had only because the cash register system works like that (like they take the order on a phone that automatically sends everything to the kitchen and till). It’s mostly because all the systems available on the market works like that.
But as everywhere, things are changing for the worse, there’s more and more violence, disrespect etc.
Fun fact, I once had French friends visiting and they saw a field where you can take fruits yourself, weight them and pay the according price. No human supervision, no cameras. They were amazed and told me “In France we wouldn’t pay for the fruits, steal the money box AND the weighting machine”
I’m with you until the last paragraph. Corner stores are all over the place in Japan. It’s fantastic.
We have cool ones here, too!
I spy digipet
People in the US don’t respect others property. Look at any atm machine or vending machine. There’s no way these things wouldn’t be vandalized immediately.
Completely this. Americans don’t like letting other people have nice things. A vending machine would be vandalized, filled with glue as a TikTok prank, attempted to be stolen, and stop working within a few days.
Americans don’t really give a shit about other people. We’re more individualistic. You got yours? Good. Fuck everyone else. If we have to have protests and fundraising efforts to TRY to convince people to help others – we got a long way to go.
Japan is built on respect for your fellow man. You can leave your wallet out somewhere and someone would return it immediately.
Respect for your fellow Japanese man. They have a long way to go in the xenophobia angle.
Americans often don’t respect other Americans, NOR other countries. We also know xenophobia/racism well.
Respect for others property might follow respect for others but that’s not a popular concept in America
It’s a shame too because automats used to be a great way for urban poor to get low cost food. I know a vending machine isn’t the same as an automat but they are similar and would be treated similarly.
This is the answer. Japan has a lot of respect for others (well, for other japanese at least), so these types of machines will last a lot longer; making the payoff more palatable.
Place a vending machine outside in America, and it’ll be vandalized in a week max.
Vending machines in the USA are common, but they are typically attached to an existing business. For instance, a Walmart or gas station will commonly host several machines in its entrance area.
Vandalize? … the entire machine would be stolen. Either by thieves wanting to steal the merchandise or money or both. Or a bunch of teens that would tie a chain to it and drag it to the end of town for fun.
When I visited california, there was a mall with multiple vending machines like the one in the OP for various foods and icecreams.
Bet it was inside the mall, with a camera watching it. Japanese vending machines like the one mentioned can be just outside nbd.
They were in the hallways, not out on the street. I didn’t look for any cameras, but there wasn’t any security nearby that would’ve seen anyone vandalize them. If there were cameras, I can’t imagine it mean much to people wearing a mask.
I’m not saying vandalism isn’t more common in the US, I’m sure it is in compared to hyper-respectful Japan, but I don’t think it’s absolutely impossible to have these.
Growing up in the south eastern US vending machines were a common sight in a number of public spaces, and they were completely fine. No idea what third-world parts of the country the rest of these people grew up in.
Sometimes those vending machines are very unsanitary and would not pass health regulations here in the US.
That one is actually pretty hot.
My boss once said that you can abuse human workers, you can underpay them, you can worsen their conditions (and if you do it slowly) they might not notice, or they going to work even harder to survive. Worst case scenario they quit, and you just find another one “new” and repeat the cycle.
But you can’t underpay robots. You can’t abuse them. Why? Because they just break. You skip on maintenance, on working conditions, on anything around robots - and you are looking on fat sum of money that just going to get burnt on a new robot and its installation.
So no, robots are not going to save money, especially in this scenario, because abuse would be massive.
Except robots don’t need to take as many breaks nor do you have to pay them minimum wage.
The problem is minimum wage is the break even equivalent of like 2-10k human hours without even factoring in expensive maintenance costs.
A return on investment of 0.5 to 2.5 years is pretty good for companies. You also have to factor the costs of maintaining a space for a human equivalent. Paying a wage doesn’t cover all labor costs.
You do actually have to pay them more than minimum wage, if you think about it.
Minimum wage in many countries is so low it’s not enough to sustain a human. You can’t do it to a robot, since it will just not do its job, no matter how many regulators you capture or how many middle management manipulations you pull. You have to pay a living wage to a robot.
This is why “people are still cheaper than robots”. What happens if there’s a 20% wave of inflation? With workers, it’s “we don’t give out 20% pay raises, grow up”, with robots, it’s “here is your power bill, it’s 30% higher to cover for any further fluctuations in inflation, pay it or shut your factory down”.
Robots need breaks too, if they are not regularly maintained they will start to make mistakes, costly mistakes, and they might break, and when one breaks, you don’t just recruit one more wage slave from the fucked up job market, you shell out a lot of money for a new robot.
There may be cases where the price of labor is lower than the price of a specific machine, but the Industrial Revolution was built on replacing labor with capital.
It isn’t evenly spread out, but it is something increasingly happening to more and more jobs.
Obviously, automation is changing work, and you can make cheaper robots that will be cheaper than working someone to do the same thing. All I’m saying is there is a significant component next to the direct “pay vs. machine maintenance costs” question.
My point is that companies and employers have got used to a ton of leeway with workers, where they can offload a ton of risk to people just because they are employees.
See for example that one case when that US airline wanted to weasel out of honouring a deal offered by their chatbot. That’s them realizing they can no longer just say it’s been a mistake made by an employee, as there is no separate legal entity to push responsibility on.
The same with paying a wage lower than living wage. If they pay sub-living wages, then the onus to make up the rest needed to lead a life that enables you to work long term, thus the risk is on you instead of the employer. If they replace you with a robot, and skimp on its requirements, it will break, and there is nowhere to push the responsibility.
I don’t see how the use or nonuse AI affects the adoption of a vending machine or self checkout.
Take the case of self-checkouts.
Money is missing from the tally at the end of the day.
In one case, you have an employee as cashier. You can reprimand them, in some jurisdictions even take it from their pay.
What do you do with a machine if money is missing? It may be a tricky customer/thief, it may be just that the machine is not always 100% accurate in certain circumstances, maybe you skimped out on maintenance one too many times. Who do you blame?
That’s why there are no vending machines for certain types of goods, or no self-checkouts at car dealerships or “bad neighbourhoods”. Sometimes the risk component is too high.
You have to pay them minimum wage, It’s just called “monthly maintenance expenses” and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
Is it? I can buy a vending machine for less than $8000. Converting that cost to minimum wage, that is ~28 full time weeks worth of labor to act as a mechanism to sell items. There are probably a lot of times when the cost in capital is less than the cost in labor.
Factories I’ve worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.
My experience here. Had one a place I worked which did breakfast foods (yogurt, breakfast sandwiches, breakfast burritos , etc) with a small microwave slot to heat up after it vended. Food was absolutely gross and it was always dicey if anything it vended was still in date. Only nice thing was the front was see through so you could check which items had visible mold and avoid those…
Was cheaper than the cafe and had better hours (all of them) for my shift, but I don’t think the trade off of rolling the dice on food poisoning was worth it lol.
Reminds me of when I had a summer job in a Steel Mill. Two hotdogs for a dollar from a vending machine (AVI). I’d eat that almost every day.
Wash it down with some SQUINCHER
Exactly.
My thought when opening the post was basically, “Can you imagine the depths that American corporations would sink to in a market where they can totally conceal the flavor, size, quality, etc. of their products until after the sale, and not have anyone from the company present, making them totally immune to any negative feedback?”
Presumably the companies behind these things in Japan are at least delivering a somewhat acceptable food item. I wouldn’t be surprised in any way to find an American version of this thing dispensing literal dead rats.
CANNED BREAD
Since you mentioned it, I’m obligated to link this clip.
cuz nobody likes eating out of plastic containers in the United States. these vending machines are full of extremely processed garbage taste like shit and produces a shitload of plastic garbage, waste garbage crap. I like Japan.
I can’t tell if this is satirical.
Have you ever seen the frozen food section of a grocery store?
I always assumed nobody buys that crap except for one town’s whale
Is this cool because it has Japan signs? Has it any more features than US machines? Or US has no vending machines at all?
There are vending machines but they generally don’t serve hot food or nearly the same amount of variety as Japanese machines do. Usually only soft drinks and shelf-stable snacks like candy bars, chips, cookies or crackers.
The US could have more hot drink vending machines, but I think the sort of clientele that wants a hot coffee wants it to be highly customized like the shit you get at Star Bucks. Highly customized, burnt coffee.
I think you underestimate how many Americans just want a cup of Joe with cream and sugar. A whole lot of us are out there drinking gas station/convenience store coffee or brewing a cup or pot every day of store brand pre-ground.
And the ongoing joke about people getting frustrated with just wanting a “large coffee” and being confused by starbucks calling it a “venti” and spouting off about how they don’t want any fru-fru mocha-chino late bullshit even though no one asked.
I think the bigger issue is that of how Americans get around and how available real estate is.
Japan has a lot more people who can/will walk, take the train, etc. that’s a lot more opportunities for them to walk by a vending machine.
Americans tend to get around in our cars, so if you want to sell them a coffee, snacks, hot meal, etc. they need to be able to park somewhere.
And vending machine food isn’t exactly a huge draw, people probably aren’t going to go to your parking lot with a row of vending machines just to grab something to eat, so you kind of need something else to draw them in, some bathrooms, gas pumps, or at least convenient parking to other stuff they need to get to, so you might as well stick a gas station there, and since you’re going to need a cashier you might as well move that vending inside and you can get more and more variety of merchandise on shelves that you can cram into some vending machines so it might as well just be a convenience store.
This vending machine is serving good that comes out already heated/ at the very least warmed. It’s not just bags of chips
This looks like it’s serving hot food. US vending machines only have cold or room temp packaged stuff. They’re very basic. The range of machines in Japan is seemingly endless, and many of them are far more complex machine wise than what we typically have here.
OK, hot food seems a fine reason to be excited
This is not exactly accurate. There are vending machines in the states which produce full cooked products. I’ve mostly only seen them in Airports ,and they generally cost more than a comparable meal at an actual airport restaurant .
And to be fair, didn’t we invent the Automat? Basically a giant vending machine general store in, like, the 50’s? I’d love to see one of those. They sounded rad.
Those automats had a fully staffed kitchen behind them, cooking and placing the food in slots to be bought
Yeah. There are vending machines that will cook you a pizza. It just turns out there isn’t that high a demand for vending machine pizza.
US $2.54
My company has a vending machine for computer accessories. For example, if you need a replacement mouse, just go over to the machine, wave your badge in front of the sensor, select the mouse, and wait for it to drop
