April 17, 2015 • 51 mins
Prompted by a listener message, the crew takes a look at vending machines. Could it be that vending machines will take the place of brick and mortar stores?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
looks at the future and says, do you collect coins? Yeah,
just in case vending machines become the dominant race. I'm
(00:20):
John and Strickland, I'm Lauren Folk, and I'm George Day. Joe,
come on, I'm sorry, don't play with my emotions that way.
Who are you really okay? I'm Joe McCormick. Today we
are going to do a listener request episode, and it's
one of the weirder listener requests we've gotten. Actually, I
don't know how weird it is. Maybe it's weird that
it's so mundane. The request is, the request is normal.
(00:43):
It was the listener who was weird. No, I'm kidding.
Wonderful listener Dan Dan Yeah, via email, he said, I
wanted to ask you guys about vending machines and the
future possibilities. It went from an old coke machine to
a t M S. I remember that tech Stuff episode
and run and even vending machines that buy your electronics
at the mall. I haven't remember seeing an article about
(01:05):
marijuana vending machines. In Colorado would love to hear back
from you guys. Dan. Well, thank you for that suggestion, Dan.
And the more I thought about this, the more I
actually did kind of want to talk about vending machines.
Where we are now, what's the what's the cutting edge
of of automated vending? And then the future because the
main thing that immediately popped into my head was the
(01:27):
role vending machines playing video games, where in video games,
vending machines are a great place to get guns and
ammunition and foods that magically healed traumatic wounds instantly, buff
buffers that magically make you better at whatever particular thing
you need to be better at that point of the game. Yeah,
(01:48):
so are are we trending towards that kind of future?
Like the gu from a vending machine, it's a BioShock
past an the retro future retro fee Um No, I
don't think Yeah, I certainly hope not. But what is
the future of vending? And before that, what is the
(02:08):
past of vending machine? Now, I have to say I
originally kind of scoffed at this idea, and I apologize
for it because the more we thought about the more
I was like, you know this is actually a much better,
much better topic than I gave it credit for. So, Dan,
you have my sincere apologies for the scoffing that you
did not hear. But uh yeah, let's let's look back
(02:29):
on the history of vending machines and it goes back
to one of my favorite people in history. I have
talked about this, dude, Edison. No not, just gotta go
further back than that. Uh, let's see Ben Franklin. Did
he create like a vending machine for turkey meat or something?
Oddly enough? Yes, but no he did not. I I'm
talking about someone else, someonepare I do love myself the bard?
(02:54):
Let me tell you I could rattle off some of
that Shakespeare right now. Is Hero of Alexandria Heron, also
known you Heron. You guys know who Heron. I know
Lauren knows who Haron is. Yeah. We were just talking
about this dudea over the other day. Yeah. So, Heron
of Alexandria is known for lots of different inventions, including
(03:19):
early versions of the steam engine, devices used to open
up temple doors as if by magic, it really was
by steam. The guy was. The guy was pretty phenomenal.
Well around two b C. He got to inventing a
water dispenser that was coin operated, supposedly for things like
(03:42):
in Egypt, where you know, he might need some water
after a nice long trip across the hot burning sands
to pay for water that's barbaric. Well, no, that's civilized.
It's incredibly civilized. So the way his dispenser worked was
really pretty ingenious. So imagine, if you will, a cylinder.
(04:02):
So you've got this big cylinder and you fill it
up with water. Now, on the base of that cylinder,
inside the cylinder, there's a little tube that projects up
from the bottom a few inches and at the base
of it is a hole that leads out. This is
where you would, you know, stick your cup underneath that
hole to dispense water. There's a plug or a stopper
of some sort that covers that that hole normally, so
(04:25):
water doesn't just immediately flow out of the cylinder, which
would make it far less useful. Uh. This plug is
attached by a chain or string of some sort to
a lever, so when the lever is in the down
position on the plug side, the plug is covering the hole.
On the other side of the lever is a small
platform which is positioned directly under a coin slot. So
(04:46):
when you put a coin in the coin slot, the
coin falls, hits the platform, lifts the lever up, which
raises the plug, which allows water to flow through the hole,
thus dispensing your liquid. And then once the coin slides
off the platform, because you know the platform keeps tilting downward,
the platform will raise back up to its normal position.
(05:07):
The plug will come down and cover the whole again,
so you won't end up losing all that precious water. Brilliant, Yeah,
until somebody shows up with a few lead disks. Yeah,
and then they end up with a lot of water
and blindness. So that taught them the so and so's.
But there are other examples of ancient or at least
(05:31):
very very old vending machines, or at least predecessors to them.
Another example dates to ten seventy six Common era in China,
when Chinese inventors created a device that would dispense pencils
for money. Pencils, yeah that I read about this in
several sources. However, I never saw any illustrations of what
it looked like, so I don't know what mechanism used
(05:52):
in order to do this, but there are a lot
of people who are very convinced that it actually was
a thing. So I will say this one is potentially
apocryphal since I couldn't find definitive resources to show it.
But it's cited lots of places, Okay, But this next
one is definitely on the record. Yeah. In fact, it
(06:14):
was another one that I was not sure about until
Joe found the the an example of it and sent
it to me, and I was like, oh, awesome, it
really did exist. Uh. This would be in the eighteen
centuries seventeen hundreds. Certain English taverns had what we're called
honor boxes, also sometimes known as trust boxes. It's where
you store your honor while you're at the tavern. You
(06:35):
would think, but no, now the honor has no place
in a tavern. No, that's not that's not true. Honor
was in fact very important for this box. The way
it worked was that you had a box that had
a coin slot in it. You would put a an
English penny in the coin slot for the English ones anyway,
and this would activate a mechanism that would unlock the
(06:56):
box so you can lift the top of the box. Right.
The one I saw in the picture had like a button.
So it seems like when you drop a coin into
the slot, it allowed you to press a button that
would pop the lid open, and that that would give
you access to the contents inside the box, which happened
to be tobacco, loose tobacco usually for a pipe. Right,
And the honor part came in because you were trusted
(07:18):
upon being able to access the contents of the box
that you wouldn't take the entire contents of the box,
but rather a single serving of tobacco. It's kind of
like those like a newspaper dispensers system. Right, Boy, did
I make out like a Bandit? Absolutely just armfuls of newspapers,
(07:39):
except I always did the free weekly one, so I
don't know that that anyway. Alright, So the concept of
the modern vending creative creative loafing circulation is my house.
The concept of modern vedding machines really dates to the
nineteenth century late nineteenth century Victorian era of in London, England, really,
(08:01):
and there are a couple of different examples that the
earliest one, or at least the mentioned. I kept finding
sites that said the earliest vending machine of this era
was for postcards in London that you would use some
coins to get a postcard from it. But there was
also a shopkeeper, a bookshop owner named Richard Carlyle, who
created a vending machine that sold books, and soon you
(08:24):
had ones that would sell food you could put you know,
the people who own the vending machine would put food
in it, and business people who are really on their
way to work doing important business things who don't have
time to pop into a pub for a pint or
three would end up putting some money in one of
these pull out some foods they can eat on the
run um. And meanwhile, if you look over at the
(08:46):
United States that around the same time there were also
inventions that fell into the vending machine category, including one
from the Adams Gum Company. They built chewing gum vending
machines that would dispense two dy fruity gum for the
princely sum of one pinning. Unfortunately it was already chewed.
(09:06):
It was not already chewed. By eighteen ninety, the U. S.
Patent Office would begin granting patents for vending machines as
off to the races at that point, and obviously, vending
machines have been used for lots of different things. I mean,
I remember as a kid going to restaurants and seeing
lots of cigarette vending machines, the old like the old
kind where you put in coins and pull a handle
and then the carton of cigarettes, well pack of cigarettes
(09:28):
that carton would pop out. Yeah. Yeah, they're still in
use in some states in the United States in businesses
that are twenty one and up I believe, or at
least eight. That would make sense, Yeah, that would make sense.
So it used to be that you could find them
all over the darn place, because I remember as a
child running across them all the time. I also had
(09:50):
them in red lobster and stuff. Oh yeah, sure. My
personal favorite was vending machines because I am Georgia boy.
We're the old old coke glass bottle vending machines have
a have a little it's almost like a fridge door.
You would put a coin in, it would unlatch the
fridge door, and then you could pull the bottle of
(10:10):
coke out from one of the little dispensary units, and
then you would drink your coke and then return the
bottle for a small deposit. And that was my childhood
summed up right there. In that experience. Um, I always
liked all the little rubber bouncy ball vending machines, like
the quarter vending machines at a publix or whatever. And
now they have the ones where it's like the gumballs
(10:31):
or whatever. They have the long almost like cork screw
slide things. So not only only is it did did
you get some gum? You get to watch it roll
down this kind of almost Rube Goldberg like pathway. You know,
the cork screws that I remember, the ones you've probably
seen in most of the like you know, food candy
bar kind of machines have chips and all that stuff
(10:53):
in them where they've got the cork screw that unwinds
to drop your thing and just enough hypothetically to drop
a single product and advance the ones behind it up
to dropping position for the next person, right, unless something
is slightly off and then nothing drops out or more
than one thing drops out, in which case Jack. But now,
also going back to the history of vending machines, there
(11:16):
were entire restaurants that used vending machines as automats. I've
been to those. Have you either of you been to
an automatic? Yeah? Yeah, they're them in movies, really novel
and not very cool. They're not very practice sandwiches, like
because obviously you know it's it's food that's been prepared
well ahead of time. Obviously, you know you wanna you
(11:38):
want to pick your battles. I would not go for
an egg sil at sandwich and an automat for example. Well,
I mean they are refrigerated, yeah, but still or slightly
heated maybe, depending on the one. Usually the ones I
encountered were normally um sandwiches, so they were just kind
of refrigerated and slices of pie. I specifically remember hospitals.
(11:58):
A lot of hospitals in Georgia had automats for their cafeterias.
Oh yeah, yeah, I remember seeing a lot of this
when I was a kid. Yeah. And if you have
not seen an example of an automat, this is a
thing where it's sort of like a like a wall
of little cubbies of food and you put a coin
into a machine and either you know, select a series
of buttons the way that you would on a dropity
food vending machine that Joe is just talking about. I'm
(12:20):
sure there's a word for that that's better than dropity food. Um,
but we'll call it a gravity Well, it's a it's
an arm trap where you're like, I'm going to get
that snickers, whether whether this machine wants me to or not,
or you would drop a coin into a specific cubby
slot and then it allows you to releases a mechanism
(12:42):
that allows you to open the door and take your
your sandwicher, can of soda or pie, your ideally delicious food. Yes,
in practice, maybe not so much so. Those are actually
kind of died out mostly in the in the nineteen eighties. Um,
they haven't. There's still places where you can find and
sometimes they're kitchy kind of uh popular spots because of
(13:04):
the novelty factor. Sure well, and that that nostalgia factor
of them being from the fifties or sixties. Okay, Well,
what's going on with vending machines today? Is there really
anything to say about them on the technological front as
they stand? There's tons of stuff to say about them, actually,
and some of them some of it's technological and some
of it's more of a policy issue. For example, on
(13:26):
the policy side, in the United States, the FDA has
ruled that vending machine operators will have to provide a
sticker or placard detailing the calorie count of food items
sold within vending machines. Clearly, that only applies to vending
machines that sell food. If you're talking about the vending
machines at your airport that sell like electronics contains ninety
(13:47):
two calories, and well, if you're going to eat it,
you should know. I like, I like the way you think.
But there have been critics who said, hey, this is
putting in an unnecessary uh burden upon the people the
companies that own the vending machines because they have to
spend the money to sticker. Although we are also seeing
(14:10):
new smart vending machines which don't even have necessarily a
window for you to see the products. It may have
a screen and interactive screen that shows you what products
are inside of it, and that same screen could show
things like nutritional information without having any additional placards or
stickers necessary. I generally think that adding the nutritional information
(14:31):
to in a way that's easily accessible by the consumer
is terrific in all cases. All the time. I think
so too. I would like to I would like to
at least have that moment of regret before I put
my money in and choose the thing. I'll still do it,
but at least I have the moment of regret um.
So another feature with smart vending machines. They are quite
(14:52):
a few, actually, and we'll talk about some of the
the the kind of on the brink ones a little bit.
But one of them is that you usually have connectivity
to a home base. So, in other words, the smart
vending machine is connected back to whatever company is in
charge of that vending machine. And that way, whenever a
(15:12):
particular item starts running low, it alerts the company. It
goes through the WiFi or cellular or whatever whatever it is,
right right, it sends a message back and says, guys,
we're running really low on moonpies. We need moonpie stats. Yes,
critical moonpie situation. R c cola machine next to us
is laughing at us if we do not get more
moonpies and uh. And so then you would have someone
(15:36):
come out and bring moonpies and and replenish the machine. Now,
in the old days, the way this worked was that
you would just have a technician, like someone who actually
stocks these things, come out you know, once every so often, right,
and then they would look at the machine and then
restock it based upon what was already you know, depleted.
(15:57):
But this way you could one meet and priest demand
whenever there was increased demand, and to not send anyone
out if for some reason traffic had slowed down. So
let's say, for example, the vending machine is at a
college campus and you're talking about the summer session. It's
probably gonna have a lot lower traffic than it would
through the rest of the year and fewer people drinking.
(16:18):
You who, right, So therefore you don't need to have
someone go out as frequently, And this way you would
actually know when you needed to send someone out, and
you could you could uh be more efficient. Yeah, yeah,
you know, maybe you had only scheduled a technician to
come out once every three weeks instead of once every
two weeks in those situations. But then all of a sudden,
there was a big football game or something, and yeah,
(16:39):
the moon pies. I don't know why that would happened
in the summer, but neither but hey, you know, I
don't know how the summer football games. Maybe it's a
big football practice and everyone wanted to go in there rest.
But the other one is that if the machine breaks down,
it could end up sending a signal, or the lack
of signal could be an alert to the home base
(17:00):
to say, all right, we need to send someone out
there to look at this and to service it so
that it comes back online. I wonder if there's a
special function for like a kid got his arm stuck
in the machine. Again, maybe maybe it could even be that,
like the it just says that the trap door has
been opened and an ordinately long amount of time, you
may want to send somebody to check it out. But again,
(17:21):
the cool thing about this is that they can send
someone right away. You reduce the downtime of that vending machine,
which is a benefit for everybody, the people who frequent
the vending machine and the company that services it, plus
all the products that are actually being shown in that one. Right,
I mean, it means that you have the least amount
of downtime possible ideally, So that's one thing that's happening
(17:44):
right now. Of course, you've got credit cards, which for
the longest time, vending machines did not, except right, you
had to have coins or dollars. Man, do you have
any quarters? Yeah? And that boy, especially as especially if
you all you had were really wrinkly bills and the
(18:05):
bill accept or was not taking them, Like you're cramming
the bill into the into the machine and it's just
not taking it. How many times have we been there?
Many many times in my case. So we're seeing a
lot more machines now that do accept credit cards, although
even that is almost an outdated technology at this point,
particularly if you're outside the United States and you're using
(18:28):
something like a chip and pin system everywhere else. Right,
So there, we really got to be talking about near
field communication. Yeah. Yeah, near field communication is becoming a
new kind of standard that we're starting to see on
a lot of vending machines that are being produced today.
And NFC technology is one that's similar to other wireless
radio transmissions. In this case, it's one that takes place
(18:50):
over a very short distance, so you have to be
very close to whatever you're communicating with in order for
this to happen. That's why you see like devices that
are allowed to share contact information, you put the two
phones right up next to each other. That's why, because
the communication distance is only effective at a very short range.
But you can have like an online wallet sort of
(19:12):
situation like Google wallet or the the I pay the
Apple version or one of a thousand other ones that
is on your phone in some sort of app, and
assuming that the vending machine can accept that, you would
hold your phone up and do your purchase through your phone,
never having to actually pull out any kind of cash
(19:32):
or credit card in order to complete that transaction. So
we're starting to see that in newer vending machines um,
which is great because for the longest time, NFC technology,
particularly in the US, was one of those things we
talked about a lot, but didn't really see them frequently,
and it's starting to finally change, which is kind of cool. Uh.
There's some other ones that have interesting features to them,
(19:54):
like the eat Wave. What eat wave? It is a
vending machine SENE that can have both refrigerated items and
microwavable items in the same vending machine, and for your
microwavable goods, it will microwave them for you and then
dispense them for you, so you would pick your thing.
Let's say you want a nice hot apple turnover and
(20:16):
also known as the skald Er. Yeah, obviously you want
this to be really precise and and not to overheat
things to the point where you're going to uh, suffer
in a fate like the bad guys and raiders have
lost arc at the end of your face just melts
off as you take a bite out of your apple turnover. Um.
But yeah, it has a microwave incorporated into the vending machine,
(20:39):
and it quote unquote knows which items are which, So
your cold items are delivered cold, your microwave items are
are either defrosted or heated up whatever it needs to
happen so that you can consume them right there in
the machine before it dispenses it to you, which is
pretty neat. That's kind of cool. Yeah, does it do
hot pockets, because I'm sure that's question Ben Bowland would
(21:01):
want answer. I'm sure it could. I don't know if
that's one of the things that you commonly find. I
have never personally set eyes upon an eat wave machine.
I've only read about them and dreamed kind of like
a uh wester roast. Those are the two things I
dream about, is the wester Ross and eat waves. Yeah.
You know, even when you're standing there in front of
(21:23):
the vending machine, you have to think in the back
of your mind winter is coming. And even when you're
writing a dragon you have to think where's my hot pop?
That's right, I mean it goes both ways, so I'm
sure George R. R. Martin will get on that in
the next novel anyway, one of the other elements. Oh
my gosh, now I want to hear a full version
of the Game of Thrones theme with all those all
(21:44):
the notes just replaced by someone singing hot pockets. At
any rate. You may have also heard some stories back
in December about the amazing vending machines in the future
that use facial recognition software and hardware. Except here's the thing.
All of the articles I was reading was like, it's
the first vitting machine to use that, and I said,
shenanigans because I specifically remember covering this for tech stuff,
(22:09):
the fact that facial recognition hardware has been a part
of vending machines in certain parts of the world for
several years. You know, I basically almost never say something
was the first of something, because every time somebody says
something like that, they turned out to be wrong. Yeah,
then that's the call for shenanigans, and then the second
for shenanigans, and then we all grab our rooms. Uh So,
(22:31):
back in two thousand eight, there was a Japanese company
that introduced some vending machines that had facial recognition hardware
and software for age verification, specifically to vend cigarettes. The
age in Japan for the legal purchase of cigarettes is twenty.
So what they did was they built this facial recognition
hardware into the vending machines that, in theory, would look
(22:54):
at a person's face and look for features that you
would expect in someone who is over the age of
twenty and who smokes so wrinkles, some sagging flesh. I'm
not making this up. It was really looking for things
that we're not associated with a young looking face, and
if the face were to match, then that would be
(23:14):
an indicator that, yes, this person is allowed to buy cigarettes.
I mean, could you just kind of hold up a potato, No,
but you could hold up a photo. In fact, there
was a there was a reporter. Was this the photo
of Bruce Willis that fooled the machine? It's one of
the photos they used was of Bruce Willis. It wasn't
the only one, however, there was a reporter with song
K Sports that went around and looked at various vending
(23:37):
machines in different cities in Japan, trying different types of photographs.
One was of I think, there was one that was
a man in his fifties. There was another one there's
a woman in her thirties. And depending upon the size
of the photo, it seemed to work pretty well. Like
if you're if your photo was too small, it would
no longer work them, it wouldn't full the machine. But
(23:58):
the photo was of a large enough size, and we're
just talking about a few inches where you can hold
it up to the camera at a appropriate distance. Although
it should be said that this was not the only
method of age verification that the machines were using, right uh.
Cigarette machines in general in Japan tend to have another
form of age verification. You have to have something called
a taskbo card. Taskbo, by the way, it stands for
(24:20):
tobacco passport. It's a it's a I'm going to cancer country.
It's flavor country. It's flavor country. It really is terrible anyway.
Taskbo cards are an age verification cards where you've you've
had to apply for it and prove your age and
then you get the card as an r F I
D chip inside of it. So that way you would
(24:41):
use that tap that while uh, while purchase, making your
purchase to prove that you are in fact of the
age that is allowed to purchase cigarettes legally. So um, yeah,
you would probably need one of those as well as
the the picture of Bruce Willis for you to order
your your um illicit cigarettes when you are a young Um,
(25:04):
don't smoke kids, so but really you're one stop shop
for this would be stealing Bruce Willis's passport or just
stealing Bruce Willis. It's not don't if you're not going
to smoke. Also, just don't kidnap Bruce Willis guys. But
if you are going to smoke, you might as well
kill I see, I see your point. Now that's perfect logic.
(25:26):
I think it's just think everything about that was wrong.
We can move on. There were there were more of
these though. Yeah. There was another story about Japanese vending
machines that could detect gender and age range based on
face recognition hardware and software. And these were beverage machines
so not not cigarette machines. So why would you want
to detect someone's gender and age? Well, these machines would
(25:49):
give recommendations of what drinks a person might like based
upon their demographics. That sounds totally offensive, It does, doesn't it.
So yeah, they said that their market research showed that
young men liked sweeter drinks than middle aged men, for example,
so the drinks that it would suggest would be moral
on the lines of the sweet drinks that their their
(26:09):
market research has shown women tend to prefer. Now, you
could choose anything, you weren't forced into whatever was suggested
for you, and those suggestions would also change depending upon
things like how late in the day it was it
and what was the temperature outside, so something like if
it was a hotter day, it might uh, it might
suggest a more quote unquote refreshing beverage um that kind
(26:31):
of stuff, so the lemonade instead of you who okay now.
According to a spokesperson for the J. R. East Water
Business Company, the new machines saw three times as much
traffic as their older machines that did not have this software.
It could not make these recommendations. I'm sure the novelty
factor was it was probably part of it. May have
(26:53):
even been that people started to discover beverages they never
tried before and really enjoyed them, and then didn't nowhere
else to get them at the were hooked to the system. Uh.
In fourteen, that's when we saw a lot more stories
about vending machines with facial recognition capabilities. And this was
when the technology was kind of breaking out of Japanese
vending machines and making its way into ones in the
(27:13):
in the United States, United Kingdom, places like that. And
of course it was being reported like it was all
brand new in the first time ever anyone did it ever?
Trust me, if we're talking about technology, you want to
look to Japan before you make that statement. Uh. Anyway,
these machines can market to you based upon your appearance,
very similar to the one we just talked about in
(27:35):
twenty ten in Japan. But beyond that, if you frequent
a particular machine, you could end up being recognized by
that machine actually has facial recognition software. Oh so it's like, oh, hey, Jonathan,
I see your back. Yeah, and I know that you
have a habit of buying this particular drink, So would
you do you want that again? Here's just your one
stop shop. You just push this little button, you're gonna
(27:57):
get exactly what you want. Also, users who frequently ordered
the Strength also frequently ordered this drink also by nine
in your tenth ones free right exactly. You can get
loyalty programs. A lot of this is leveraging stuff that
has been proven to work in other areas. So, for example,
the you might also like very similar to Amazon right,
and the loyalty programs are just like everything. Like, if
(28:18):
you've ever gone to any coffee shop, there's probably a
loyalty program there. Uh, and lots of other retail establishments
use that same sort of model. So why not vending
machines And this is one of the things that that
the facial recognition hardware might allow people to do. You
might think it's a little creepy that the machine knows
who you are and what you like, but on the
(28:39):
flip side, it may mean that you don't have to
surf through you know, twenty other choices that are not
valid to your your needs and you just get immediately
what you want when you want it. So it all
depends on your perspective. You know, I don't know how
much there is to this, but I at least saw
some sensational looking headlines about future vending machines that will
(28:59):
be designed to food shame you. Yeah. Yeah, there's actually
I've seen some stuff too that I don't know if
it was based upon any specific reports or if it
was just sort of a conjecture, well, experiment, that's a
generous way. Well, if these machines recognize you, then they
(29:20):
can keep databases of information about you and your family members,
and and they can recommend products to your really chubby
but and maybe they look at you and say you
don't look like you need a Snickers, or or say like, like,
you look like you've given up, let me give you two. Yeah,
I'm about to say, I don't think there's ever gonna
be a machine that's gonna say like, no, I'm not
(29:42):
going to sell anything to you. It's kind of empathetical
to the whole purpose that now I might say, you
don't really want that thing, you want this other thing
that would be better for you. It also happens to
be twice as expensive that I could totally see. But
there's also some concerns that it could be hooked into
things like medical records. So let's say that you are
someone who has diabetes and you come up to the machine.
The machine will not show you anything that could potentially
(30:05):
cause you harm. On the one hand, that sounds like
it's a responsible thing. On the other hand, anytime you
have any sort of point of contact that has access
to things like medical records, that's a potential vulnerability and
a huge security concern. Yeah. No. Also, I mean I
bulk at the very idea that that in this our
(30:25):
free society, we are not allowed to kill ourselves slowly
with the things that we can see. Well, maybe it
would be something like Lauren. You would walk up to
it, it it would say, Laura, no, you don't really want
that particular treat because that's going to make you stabby, stabby,
So let's have this other treat that's gonna make you
happy happy. I don't know. It might be like Lauren, warning,
this has lots of peppers in it. Well, that would
(30:46):
be a good one. I would totally take that kind
of warning, like, hey, yeah, it could be something like
allergies as well. I mean, that's that's a total possibility.
But you know what I would prefer is when you
walk up to it, if you were making a profile,
for example, you might say, oh, I'm allergic to peanuts
for example. Then then it could avoid from that moment
(31:07):
on with facial recognition saying oh, this person happens to
allergic to peanuts. There's no connecting to any kind of
medical database in that sense. You've just set up a
profile with preferences and things that you should not have. Granted,
if you're allergic to peanuts, you probably don't want to
get something from a vending machine that has a lot
of stuff that has peanuts in it. Anyway, you can
try the new Snickers that has salt cod instead of peanuts,
(31:29):
the Ludfisk stickers. This also sounds like the kind of
thing that I would I would just go up to
with like pictures of all of my friends and teach
the machine like this person only likes salt card. Them
likes the super sour gummy worms. That's all. That's the
only thing they ever want. Well, let's let's talk about
(31:50):
some some of the weird and extravagant vending machines I
came across while doing research on this topic. You know,
I saw these notes you wrote Jonathan, and it's like, well,
obviously Jonathan has been had by some people pulling April
Fools pranks. No, I did extensive research that makes certain
these things really did app Yeah, so let's say that
(32:12):
you are you know, you're a mover and or a shaker,
and uh, you are one of the hot people. And
of course you're living in Beverly Hills, because where else
would you live? And there you decide, you know what,
I'm in the mall and I really want some caviar.
So I'm just gonna walk up to this vending machine
that sells caviare at s Cargo and plunk in about
(32:32):
five bucks for some caviar. The beluga caviare sells for
five ounce. You can buy an ounce of beluga caviar
for five dollars at one of these vending machines. You know,
knock yourself out. And also, in case you're worried about
looking ghosh eating your caviar with a plastic spoon from
(32:53):
the food court, you can also buy a mother of
Pearl spoon to go with that, so that way, you know, well,
that's good, I'm glad, I'm relieved. So you actually keep
the spoon or do you just like put a deposit
on I think I think, well you can either keep
it or you just toss it to the side. Because
everything in your life is disposable, so um, then obviously
(33:18):
you would probably use some sort of crack card or
NFC device, because I don't think anyone wants to sit
there feeding five one dollar bills and I gotta get
that caveat four hours later. Oh, it's gonna be so good.
So there are vending machines in China that sell live
crabs a life crabs. You know, I thought the life
(33:38):
crab must be some special kind of device and chose
not to correct. I am so happy that not only
did you choose not to correct it, but I chose
to go ahead and call it out anyway. It should
be live crabs in our notes, not life life crabs. No,
but live crabs almost as interesting as life crabs. If
(33:58):
there was a machine that just said life crabs in
that just to see what happens. I'm kind of with
you on that one, Joe. In this case, they are
crabs that are alive, and but the the vending machine
itself is chilled so that they are, you know, dormant.
(34:18):
But which is good because I'm not sure. Yeah, having
a live and active crab dispensed out of a vending machine,
while entertaining, would probably not have the results you were
hoping for. And obviously you would use this to buy
a crab and then take an omen and eat it.
Oh man, what a horror when the crab machine breaks down. Yeah,
(34:39):
well you could always go to the lobster machine. And
I'm not making that up either. There was actually, at
first I thought was only a single restaurant in Las Vegas,
but apparently at some point or another there were about
eight of these machines along the Vegas Strip and in
Fremont as well. And they are serious a lobster machine.
I'm absolutely serious. Yeah, as it. You know those crap
(35:01):
those claw games that you see in the arcades where
they have like the stuffed animals and stuff. Yeah, so
it's one of those, except it has live lobsters, main
lobsters in it. It's a saltwater tank with a claw
at the top and a joystick that controls the claw.
You put two bucks in, you maneuver the claw, you
push the button, the claw goes down if it grabs
(35:21):
a lobster and places it in the bucket. Typically they
would take a picture of you with the lobster and
then cook it up for you for free, for free. Yeah,
this particular restaurant I was looking at they did that
for free, Like, so your lobster meal would cost two bucks.
On the first truck crane games, they pick up a
(35:41):
stuffed animal. How could they pick up The very first
time I ever played a crane game, I won a
stuffed animal the very first time. How many times have
I won something since then? Zero? I used to go
to a laundromat that had a crane game full of knives.
That's almost as good as the lobsters. I I want
(36:03):
to put in that, like, I'm offended on a humanity
level that that there are claw games with live animals
in them. I'm not I'm not even that touchy feely
a lobster. It's a cockroach that lives underwater. I am
aware of that. I'm just saying like, that's like I
am not like a member of Peter or anything like that.
(36:23):
I left out the machine and include that one. But no,
I'm just there was not a puppy ending. Let's talk
about something else about pizza. So the let's pizza veending machines.
These took off in Italy and also I believe you
can find them in the UK. I don't know if
they're ay in the United States, but these are vending
(36:45):
machines that make a pizza for you to order when
you order it, so there's not like a bunch of
cheese pizzas that just get heated up and then serve
to you. Instead, when you put your money in and
you make your selection, let's say you want a pepperoni pizza,
then it'll will go ahead and mix flour and water
together to make dough. It'll need that dough, it'll roll,
(37:05):
roll the dough out, put the sauce, the cheese, the
pepperoni on your pizza, cook it with an infrared oven,
and the whole thing. The whole process supposedly takes about
three minutes from start to finish, and then you get
your own like made to order pepperoni pizza. I have
no idea if it's any good, but when I looked
(37:26):
at that, I was like, I kind of want to
try one, just to just to kind of experience it
and see if is this How does it stack up
to the three D printed pizza? Yeah? Really that's the
real question. Yeah, obviously there is a taste test that
is in need, and I think for thinking is up
to the task. Um. And then they're also French fry
vending machines to go with your pizza. This was one
(37:48):
of those things that when I heard about him, like,
please tell me that it fries the fries right then
and there, because I can't stand the thought of just
stale French fries. Yeah, nothing worse than French. That's pretty awful.
So in case, these are actually frozen fries that are
flash fried when you put in your money. I supposedly
these are vending machines that you can find in Australia.
(38:09):
So you put your money in flash fries, the fries
serves them up to you in a little little container
and you can take your fries and munch them on
the way home. And I decided to end this list.
There's tons of stuff we can talk about. I mean,
just just to panel alone. Oh sure, sure, well, I
mean even here in Atlanta there's a cupcake vending machine.
Yeah yeah, there there are a couple of different cupcake
(38:30):
vending machines that I came across when I was looking,
and they even can put sprinkles on them. But the
one I was looking at the in Paris you can
buy baguettes from vending machines. So if you want your yes,
I mean, it makes perfect sense for for Paris, uh,
now we get to a point where we start talking
about whether or not there's actually a future for vending machines.
(38:53):
And the reason why we even have this discussion is
when Joe first brought up this listener mail and said
we should do this. My first reaction was at vending machines,
how are they relevant now? Because I was thinking about
another story that broke recently here in Atlanta. Atlanta is
one of the markets where Amazon is rolling out its
(39:14):
Prime Now service, which is where if you're an Amazon
Prime member, you can order something and for free, you
can get the delivery within two hours for certain items,
and for an additional fee, you can get it within
an hour of ordering it. And I thought, in a
world where I can sit at home and order whatever
it is I want and get it within an hour
(39:34):
without leaving my house, why would I even care about
vending machines. I mean, we had talked about the potential
for vending machines to replace brick and mortar stores. They
have a much lower footprint, much smaller footprints. So obviously
there's that that has a big, you know, attractive factor
to it. But then I was thinking, but I don't
(39:55):
don't you have to leave my house, and I thought, wait,
sometimes I do leave my house, and those rare occasions
when I leave my house and I'm somewhere else, I
might want to get something and yet not talk to anybody.
How can I do that without becoming the most you know,
socially awkward or stand offish person. Well, vending machines. That's
(40:16):
a great solution, right, I can get the stuff I
need from a vending machine while I'm out and about
and yet not have to interface talk to a person. Yeah,
I think it had broad her since this is sort
of the question about where and when commerce is going
to happen in the future, because a just one example,
(40:37):
a perhaps unfortunate fact for people who work as cashiers
is that like determining the cost of an item and
then accepting payment and then making change are all tasks
that are pretty easy to automate, as we've seen from
the self check outlines at the grocery store or the
hardware store. Yeah, and it's it's kind of strange in
(41:00):
my opinion that there are still as many cashiers left
with jobs as there are. I mean, I'm sorry to
say that. I don't mean like that cashiers can do
all kinds of great things that that computers can't do.
You know, they can help you, you know, they can
interact with you personally, and they can take stuff out
to your car for you. Um, they do provide a
(41:21):
lot of services that can't be automated. But it just
seems like, I don't know businesses that are in the
mindset of, you know, let's slash all the features and
get it down to the bare bones. I think there's
gonna be a lot of that going on, a lot
of automation of the selling point kind of tasks there.
(41:41):
But coupled that with the sort of increasing demand to
scale down physical space, especially in urban areas, and the
approach of on demand manufacturing, and it seems to me
like you've got a recipe for an economy in which
vending machines replace many kinds of other or traditional points
(42:01):
of sale like stores and kiosks and stuff. One example
that I thought about was books. I mean, think about
what happens when you buy a new book and let's
say you know, you're not exactly so yeah, let's say
you want a paper book and not the book kind,
(42:21):
and there are still bookstores. You know, you can go
out to a Barnes and Noble or something that pulped
dead trees. They're great. I've heard tell of such places.
So imagine you're the person Jonathan that would walk into
a book start and buy a new copy of a book.
Why wouldn't that store be replaced with a book vending machine?
(42:42):
And it doesn't need to hold copies of every book
that there could possibly be in the store. It just
needs digital memory banks, paper cover material, glue ink. You
know that's about printed demands. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You key
in your selection, authorized payment, the machine prints out and
binds your book in a few minutes. I mean, how
(43:04):
many other types of products could this be applied to
with with three D printing and all kinds of technology
like that, Shure. I do imagine that it would probably
take longer than a few minutes, depending on how long
the book is. But even so, you could have to
be looking at like things that have to dry, like inconglue, right,
But you could totally have it be a thing where
you make your order, you go do something else, and
(43:26):
when you come back, your book is done, and then
you put in a little code and it drops your
book in. Like I could see that, like there even
if you have the objection of some of these things
we propose take more time to put together than just
a few minutes, using the technology of creating a unique
code identifier for each consumer, so that when your order
(43:47):
is ready, you just go up and it's just like
the old vending machines where you want to get that
candy bar, you put your code in, but instead of
it opening up so that it you know, or unraveling
so your candy bar falls down, it drops the appropriate
order into the receptacle and then you pick it up
and probably you wouldn't even have to enter your code.
It would just scan your eyeball or your brain, implanet
(44:08):
arrify d chip or oh yeah, I remember this guy,
he has terrible tasted books. Yeah. Yeah, here's your Dan Brown,
here's your tech war. There you go. No, I I
totally see your point, Joe, And like especially part of
part of a distant future, as you know, one of
those moves towards automating all of these low skill jobs
(44:30):
and letting people do more creative, fulfilling jobs. Uh, which
is hypothetically great, um, but you know, at risk of
sounding completely obvious, just because something can be automated doesn't
mean that it's necessarily easier. Easier, It certainly doesn't mean
that it's cheaper, um, and it might not even be
more desirable. I mean, if you suggested to the owner
(44:53):
of a privately owned second hand bookstore that they buy
a robot instead of manning the desk themselves, well, I
guess it depends on the temperament of the bookstore owner.
Like you know that black and black books, Yeah, I mean,
but but I but I would I would argue that
black and black books his main pleasure in life comes
from being disdainful to people who come into his bookshop. Yeah,
(45:15):
but he could just sit outside side and drink wine
and be disdainful of people as they walk into his bookshop.
I suppose that's true either either way. I imagine that
you would elicit a strong response from from that sort
of suggestion, and I would pose it that there is
something to be said for having the human element in
small daily interactions. There's been a whole bunch of psychological
(45:36):
research done on the types of societies in which automated
vending has taken off, and the effects of not interacting
with humans is often um. The results of those psychological
studies of course, are like, we don't know yet. More
research needs to be done, as often happens in psychological studies.
UM and as far as the expense goes, I wanted
(45:56):
to bring up an interesting application of automated vending. This
is a This is an automated robotic library at the
University of Chicago. It uses this huge robotic system to
retrieve materials. UM. Its stacks take up one seven of
the usual space, which is pretty cool. Uh. It's reading
room is huge and light filled and gorgeous because you
(46:17):
don't have to worry about the kind of uh the
kind of light issues that that sensitive materials have. You know,
it can store those sensitive materials much more carefully, with
much less interaction with unnecessary dirty librarian hands, all the
oils and stuff that could damage the materials. Sure that
there's still library staff, of course, to help you out
(46:39):
and and help you figure out what you're looking for
and how to find it. Umture of libraries. Someday we
absolutely should. And the thing only cost like one million dollars,
easily within every library's budget. Yeah, the big, big money
making uh organizations that are libraries. I keep wanting to say,
(47:03):
libraries just just to be just to be contrary, well,
you know, any library is expensive, given that the containment
systems for dangerous librarians. Yes, all the librarians with their
clowd hands and their habit of of Uh, you don't
listen to night Vale, do you Jo? Yeah, librarians are
pretty terrifying creatures, as welcome to night Failure also in
(47:26):
real life. So I know librarians, they are terrifying. They're
awesome in the true sense of the word. They inspire
awe Anyway, one of the other things I wanted to
mention is that if we do move to a future
where vending becomes more of a commonplace sort of means
of getting materials when you are products, services, whatever, I
(47:49):
guess it'd have to be good. So, I mean, you
might get a coupon for a service that way. But
if that happens to be more prevalent in the future,
there are other questions this brings up. I mean, obviously,
what happens to the people who would otherwise be employed
by the brick and mortar versions of the stores, which
we've kind of touched upon. That is of question that
we don't necessarily have an answer to. I mean, ideally, yes,
(48:11):
they get better jobs doing something else, but that's kind
of a pie in the sky, idealized world answer, not
a real world answer. Also, what happens to the space
of the brick and mortar stores that go out of
business when something like this, where you have the combination
of services like Amazon Prime Now and vending machines out
in public, When all of that is meeting many of
(48:33):
our needs, maybe not all of them, but enough of them,
what happens to all the space for the stores that
used to do those things. What do we turn that into.
That's a really interesting question that we can't really answer here.
We didn't prepare for that, But I think that could
be a fun episode in the future to talk about.
As we get more efficient, as we create these new
(48:55):
on demand services that can do things like create furniture
or books or whatever you might think of in these
these this on demand manufacturing world, what do we do
with all the space that used to be there just
to hold the stuff? Build more apartments and water slides.
I am in favor of the water slides, uh, depending
(49:17):
upon where in town you want to put those apartments.
I've got some strong opinions about that, but that's because
of traffic in my neighborhood anyway, Uh, I am curious
about that. I think we should do an episode at
some point about, you know, some of the other perhaps
uh problems that we don't really necessarily consider that could
(49:37):
go along with this amazing vision of the future. What
what do we do with that? And if it all
turns out to be water slides? That's an awesome conversation
all by itself. I'm also curious what our listeners think.
What do you think about live crabs or live crabs,
Live crabs and librarians. That should be the title of
this episode, which would make no sense whatsoever, But I'm
(49:58):
okay with that Occasionally, UM, I probably won't call it
life crabs and Librarians, But I am curious what you
guys think about vending machines, also, just the idea of
what happens to the people and the space that would
normally be dedicated to things that vending machines could potentially replace.
Do you think there is a future? Do you think
(50:18):
this whole vending machine thing is one of those deals
that's always going to have like a niche, but it's
never going to get bigger than that. That's a valid response,
but I'm curious what you guys think. Also, if you
have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, I'd
like to hear those as well. Can you get in
touch with us by writing us an email. The address
is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or
(50:40):
drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.
At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking at Facebook.
Just search fw thinking in the search bar will pop up.
You can join the conversations and as a message, we
read all of them. We really enjoy them. Keep them coming.
We'll talk to you again really soon. For more on
(51:03):
this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking
dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
looks at the future and says, do you collect coins? Yeah,
just in case vending machines become the dominant race. I'm
(00:20):
John and Strickland, I'm Lauren Folk, and I'm George Day. Joe,
come on, I'm sorry, don't play with my emotions that way.
Who are you really okay? I'm Joe McCormick. Today we
are going to do a listener request episode, and it's
one of the weirder listener requests we've gotten. Actually, I
don't know how weird it is. Maybe it's weird that
it's so mundane. The request is, the request is normal.
(00:43):
It was the listener who was weird. No, I'm kidding.
Wonderful listener Dan Dan Yeah, via email, he said, I
wanted to ask you guys about vending machines and the
future possibilities. It went from an old coke machine to
a t M S. I remember that tech Stuff episode
and run and even vending machines that buy your electronics
at the mall. I haven't remember seeing an article about
(01:05):
marijuana vending machines. In Colorado would love to hear back
from you guys. Dan. Well, thank you for that suggestion, Dan.
And the more I thought about this, the more I
actually did kind of want to talk about vending machines.
Where we are now, what's the what's the cutting edge
of of automated vending? And then the future because the
main thing that immediately popped into my head was the
(01:27):
role vending machines playing video games, where in video games,
vending machines are a great place to get guns and
ammunition and foods that magically healed traumatic wounds instantly, buff
buffers that magically make you better at whatever particular thing
you need to be better at that point of the game. Yeah,
(01:48):
so are are we trending towards that kind of future?
Like the gu from a vending machine, it's a BioShock
past an the retro future retro fee Um No, I
don't think Yeah, I certainly hope not. But what is
the future of vending? And before that, what is the
(02:08):
past of vending machine? Now, I have to say I
originally kind of scoffed at this idea, and I apologize
for it because the more we thought about the more
I was like, you know this is actually a much better,
much better topic than I gave it credit for. So, Dan,
you have my sincere apologies for the scoffing that you
did not hear. But uh yeah, let's let's look back
(02:29):
on the history of vending machines and it goes back
to one of my favorite people in history. I have
talked about this, dude, Edison. No not, just gotta go
further back than that. Uh, let's see Ben Franklin. Did
he create like a vending machine for turkey meat or something?
Oddly enough? Yes, but no he did not. I I'm
talking about someone else, someonepare I do love myself the bard?
(02:54):
Let me tell you I could rattle off some of
that Shakespeare right now. Is Hero of Alexandria Heron, also
known you Heron. You guys know who Heron. I know
Lauren knows who Haron is. Yeah. We were just talking
about this dudea over the other day. Yeah. So, Heron
of Alexandria is known for lots of different inventions, including
(03:19):
early versions of the steam engine, devices used to open
up temple doors as if by magic, it really was
by steam. The guy was. The guy was pretty phenomenal.
Well around two b C. He got to inventing a
water dispenser that was coin operated, supposedly for things like
(03:42):
in Egypt, where you know, he might need some water
after a nice long trip across the hot burning sands
to pay for water that's barbaric. Well, no, that's civilized.
It's incredibly civilized. So the way his dispenser worked was
really pretty ingenious. So imagine, if you will, a cylinder.
(04:02):
So you've got this big cylinder and you fill it
up with water. Now, on the base of that cylinder,
inside the cylinder, there's a little tube that projects up
from the bottom a few inches and at the base
of it is a hole that leads out. This is
where you would, you know, stick your cup underneath that
hole to dispense water. There's a plug or a stopper
of some sort that covers that that hole normally, so
(04:25):
water doesn't just immediately flow out of the cylinder, which
would make it far less useful. Uh. This plug is
attached by a chain or string of some sort to
a lever, so when the lever is in the down
position on the plug side, the plug is covering the hole.
On the other side of the lever is a small
platform which is positioned directly under a coin slot. So
(04:46):
when you put a coin in the coin slot, the
coin falls, hits the platform, lifts the lever up, which
raises the plug, which allows water to flow through the hole,
thus dispensing your liquid. And then once the coin slides
off the platform, because you know the platform keeps tilting downward,
the platform will raise back up to its normal position.
(05:07):
The plug will come down and cover the whole again,
so you won't end up losing all that precious water. Brilliant, Yeah,
until somebody shows up with a few lead disks. Yeah,
and then they end up with a lot of water
and blindness. So that taught them the so and so's.
But there are other examples of ancient or at least
(05:31):
very very old vending machines, or at least predecessors to them.
Another example dates to ten seventy six Common era in China,
when Chinese inventors created a device that would dispense pencils
for money. Pencils, yeah that I read about this in
several sources. However, I never saw any illustrations of what
it looked like, so I don't know what mechanism used
(05:52):
in order to do this, but there are a lot
of people who are very convinced that it actually was
a thing. So I will say this one is potentially
apocryphal since I couldn't find definitive resources to show it.
But it's cited lots of places, Okay, But this next
one is definitely on the record. Yeah. In fact, it
(06:14):
was another one that I was not sure about until
Joe found the the an example of it and sent
it to me, and I was like, oh, awesome, it
really did exist. Uh. This would be in the eighteen
centuries seventeen hundreds. Certain English taverns had what we're called
honor boxes, also sometimes known as trust boxes. It's where
you store your honor while you're at the tavern. You
(06:35):
would think, but no, now the honor has no place
in a tavern. No, that's not that's not true. Honor
was in fact very important for this box. The way
it worked was that you had a box that had
a coin slot in it. You would put a an
English penny in the coin slot for the English ones anyway,
and this would activate a mechanism that would unlock the
(06:56):
box so you can lift the top of the box. Right.
The one I saw in the picture had like a button.
So it seems like when you drop a coin into
the slot, it allowed you to press a button that
would pop the lid open, and that that would give
you access to the contents inside the box, which happened
to be tobacco, loose tobacco usually for a pipe. Right,
And the honor part came in because you were trusted
(07:18):
upon being able to access the contents of the box
that you wouldn't take the entire contents of the box,
but rather a single serving of tobacco. It's kind of
like those like a newspaper dispensers system. Right, Boy, did
I make out like a Bandit? Absolutely just armfuls of newspapers,
(07:39):
except I always did the free weekly one, so I
don't know that that anyway. Alright, So the concept of
the modern vending creative creative loafing circulation is my house.
The concept of modern vedding machines really dates to the
nineteenth century late nineteenth century Victorian era of in London, England, really,
(08:01):
and there are a couple of different examples that the
earliest one, or at least the mentioned. I kept finding
sites that said the earliest vending machine of this era
was for postcards in London that you would use some
coins to get a postcard from it. But there was
also a shopkeeper, a bookshop owner named Richard Carlyle, who
created a vending machine that sold books, and soon you
(08:24):
had ones that would sell food you could put you know,
the people who own the vending machine would put food
in it, and business people who are really on their
way to work doing important business things who don't have
time to pop into a pub for a pint or
three would end up putting some money in one of
these pull out some foods they can eat on the
run um. And meanwhile, if you look over at the
(08:46):
United States that around the same time there were also
inventions that fell into the vending machine category, including one
from the Adams Gum Company. They built chewing gum vending
machines that would dispense two dy fruity gum for the
princely sum of one pinning. Unfortunately it was already chewed.
(09:06):
It was not already chewed. By eighteen ninety, the U. S.
Patent Office would begin granting patents for vending machines as
off to the races at that point, and obviously, vending
machines have been used for lots of different things. I mean,
I remember as a kid going to restaurants and seeing
lots of cigarette vending machines, the old like the old
kind where you put in coins and pull a handle
and then the carton of cigarettes, well pack of cigarettes
(09:28):
that carton would pop out. Yeah. Yeah, they're still in
use in some states in the United States in businesses
that are twenty one and up I believe, or at
least eight. That would make sense, Yeah, that would make sense.
So it used to be that you could find them
all over the darn place, because I remember as a
child running across them all the time. I also had
(09:50):
them in red lobster and stuff. Oh yeah, sure. My
personal favorite was vending machines because I am Georgia boy.
We're the old old coke glass bottle vending machines have
a have a little it's almost like a fridge door.
You would put a coin in, it would unlatch the
fridge door, and then you could pull the bottle of
(10:10):
coke out from one of the little dispensary units, and
then you would drink your coke and then return the
bottle for a small deposit. And that was my childhood
summed up right there. In that experience. Um, I always
liked all the little rubber bouncy ball vending machines, like
the quarter vending machines at a publix or whatever. And
now they have the ones where it's like the gumballs
(10:31):
or whatever. They have the long almost like cork screw
slide things. So not only only is it did did
you get some gum? You get to watch it roll
down this kind of almost Rube Goldberg like pathway. You know,
the cork screws that I remember, the ones you've probably
seen in most of the like you know, food candy
bar kind of machines have chips and all that stuff
(10:53):
in them where they've got the cork screw that unwinds
to drop your thing and just enough hypothetically to drop
a single product and advance the ones behind it up
to dropping position for the next person, right, unless something
is slightly off and then nothing drops out or more
than one thing drops out, in which case Jack. But now,
also going back to the history of vending machines, there
(11:16):
were entire restaurants that used vending machines as automats. I've
been to those. Have you either of you been to
an automatic? Yeah? Yeah, they're them in movies, really novel
and not very cool. They're not very practice sandwiches, like
because obviously you know it's it's food that's been prepared
well ahead of time. Obviously, you know you wanna you
(11:38):
want to pick your battles. I would not go for
an egg sil at sandwich and an automat for example. Well,
I mean they are refrigerated, yeah, but still or slightly
heated maybe, depending on the one. Usually the ones I
encountered were normally um sandwiches, so they were just kind
of refrigerated and slices of pie. I specifically remember hospitals.
(11:58):
A lot of hospitals in Georgia had automats for their cafeterias.
Oh yeah, yeah, I remember seeing a lot of this
when I was a kid. Yeah. And if you have
not seen an example of an automat, this is a
thing where it's sort of like a like a wall
of little cubbies of food and you put a coin
into a machine and either you know, select a series
of buttons the way that you would on a dropity
food vending machine that Joe is just talking about. I'm
(12:20):
sure there's a word for that that's better than dropity food. Um,
but we'll call it a gravity Well, it's a it's
an arm trap where you're like, I'm going to get
that snickers, whether whether this machine wants me to or not,
or you would drop a coin into a specific cubby
slot and then it allows you to releases a mechanism
(12:42):
that allows you to open the door and take your
your sandwicher, can of soda or pie, your ideally delicious food. Yes,
in practice, maybe not so much so. Those are actually
kind of died out mostly in the in the nineteen eighties. Um,
they haven't. There's still places where you can find and
sometimes they're kitchy kind of uh popular spots because of
(13:04):
the novelty factor. Sure well, and that that nostalgia factor
of them being from the fifties or sixties. Okay, Well,
what's going on with vending machines today? Is there really
anything to say about them on the technological front as
they stand? There's tons of stuff to say about them, actually,
and some of them some of it's technological and some
of it's more of a policy issue. For example, on
(13:26):
the policy side, in the United States, the FDA has
ruled that vending machine operators will have to provide a
sticker or placard detailing the calorie count of food items
sold within vending machines. Clearly, that only applies to vending
machines that sell food. If you're talking about the vending
machines at your airport that sell like electronics contains ninety
(13:47):
two calories, and well, if you're going to eat it,
you should know. I like, I like the way you think.
But there have been critics who said, hey, this is
putting in an unnecessary uh burden upon the people the
companies that own the vending machines because they have to
spend the money to sticker. Although we are also seeing
(14:10):
new smart vending machines which don't even have necessarily a
window for you to see the products. It may have
a screen and interactive screen that shows you what products
are inside of it, and that same screen could show
things like nutritional information without having any additional placards or
stickers necessary. I generally think that adding the nutritional information
(14:31):
to in a way that's easily accessible by the consumer
is terrific in all cases. All the time. I think
so too. I would like to I would like to
at least have that moment of regret before I put
my money in and choose the thing. I'll still do it,
but at least I have the moment of regret um.
So another feature with smart vending machines. They are quite
(14:52):
a few, actually, and we'll talk about some of the
the the kind of on the brink ones a little bit.
But one of them is that you usually have connectivity
to a home base. So, in other words, the smart
vending machine is connected back to whatever company is in
charge of that vending machine. And that way, whenever a
(15:12):
particular item starts running low, it alerts the company. It
goes through the WiFi or cellular or whatever whatever it is,
right right, it sends a message back and says, guys,
we're running really low on moonpies. We need moonpie stats. Yes,
critical moonpie situation. R c cola machine next to us
is laughing at us if we do not get more
moonpies and uh. And so then you would have someone
(15:36):
come out and bring moonpies and and replenish the machine. Now,
in the old days, the way this worked was that
you would just have a technician, like someone who actually
stocks these things, come out you know, once every so often, right,
and then they would look at the machine and then
restock it based upon what was already you know, depleted.
(15:57):
But this way you could one meet and priest demand
whenever there was increased demand, and to not send anyone
out if for some reason traffic had slowed down. So
let's say, for example, the vending machine is at a
college campus and you're talking about the summer session. It's
probably gonna have a lot lower traffic than it would
through the rest of the year and fewer people drinking.
(16:18):
You who, right, So therefore you don't need to have
someone go out as frequently, And this way you would
actually know when you needed to send someone out, and
you could you could uh be more efficient. Yeah, yeah,
you know, maybe you had only scheduled a technician to
come out once every three weeks instead of once every
two weeks in those situations. But then all of a sudden,
there was a big football game or something, and yeah,
(16:39):
the moon pies. I don't know why that would happened
in the summer, but neither but hey, you know, I
don't know how the summer football games. Maybe it's a
big football practice and everyone wanted to go in there rest.
But the other one is that if the machine breaks down,
it could end up sending a signal, or the lack
of signal could be an alert to the home base
(17:00):
to say, all right, we need to send someone out
there to look at this and to service it so
that it comes back online. I wonder if there's a
special function for like a kid got his arm stuck
in the machine. Again, maybe maybe it could even be that,
like the it just says that the trap door has
been opened and an ordinately long amount of time, you
may want to send somebody to check it out. But again,
(17:21):
the cool thing about this is that they can send
someone right away. You reduce the downtime of that vending machine,
which is a benefit for everybody, the people who frequent
the vending machine and the company that services it, plus
all the products that are actually being shown in that one. Right,
I mean, it means that you have the least amount
of downtime possible ideally, So that's one thing that's happening
(17:44):
right now. Of course, you've got credit cards, which for
the longest time, vending machines did not, except right, you
had to have coins or dollars. Man, do you have
any quarters? Yeah? And that boy, especially as especially if
you all you had were really wrinkly bills and the
(18:05):
bill accept or was not taking them, Like you're cramming
the bill into the into the machine and it's just
not taking it. How many times have we been there?
Many many times in my case. So we're seeing a
lot more machines now that do accept credit cards, although
even that is almost an outdated technology at this point,
particularly if you're outside the United States and you're using
(18:28):
something like a chip and pin system everywhere else. Right,
So there, we really got to be talking about near
field communication. Yeah. Yeah, near field communication is becoming a
new kind of standard that we're starting to see on
a lot of vending machines that are being produced today.
And NFC technology is one that's similar to other wireless
radio transmissions. In this case, it's one that takes place
(18:50):
over a very short distance, so you have to be
very close to whatever you're communicating with in order for
this to happen. That's why you see like devices that
are allowed to share contact information, you put the two
phones right up next to each other. That's why, because
the communication distance is only effective at a very short range.
But you can have like an online wallet sort of
(19:12):
situation like Google wallet or the the I pay the
Apple version or one of a thousand other ones that
is on your phone in some sort of app, and
assuming that the vending machine can accept that, you would
hold your phone up and do your purchase through your phone,
never having to actually pull out any kind of cash
(19:32):
or credit card in order to complete that transaction. So
we're starting to see that in newer vending machines um,
which is great because for the longest time, NFC technology,
particularly in the US, was one of those things we
talked about a lot, but didn't really see them frequently,
and it's starting to finally change, which is kind of cool. Uh.
There's some other ones that have interesting features to them,
(19:54):
like the eat Wave. What eat wave? It is a
vending machine SENE that can have both refrigerated items and
microwavable items in the same vending machine, and for your
microwavable goods, it will microwave them for you and then
dispense them for you, so you would pick your thing.
Let's say you want a nice hot apple turnover and
(20:16):
also known as the skald Er. Yeah, obviously you want
this to be really precise and and not to overheat
things to the point where you're going to uh, suffer
in a fate like the bad guys and raiders have
lost arc at the end of your face just melts
off as you take a bite out of your apple turnover. Um.
But yeah, it has a microwave incorporated into the vending machine,
(20:39):
and it quote unquote knows which items are which, So
your cold items are delivered cold, your microwave items are
are either defrosted or heated up whatever it needs to
happen so that you can consume them right there in
the machine before it dispenses it to you, which is
pretty neat. That's kind of cool. Yeah, does it do
hot pockets, because I'm sure that's question Ben Bowland would
(21:01):
want answer. I'm sure it could. I don't know if
that's one of the things that you commonly find. I
have never personally set eyes upon an eat wave machine.
I've only read about them and dreamed kind of like
a uh wester roast. Those are the two things I
dream about, is the wester Ross and eat waves. Yeah.
You know, even when you're standing there in front of
(21:23):
the vending machine, you have to think in the back
of your mind winter is coming. And even when you're
writing a dragon you have to think where's my hot pop?
That's right, I mean it goes both ways, so I'm
sure George R. R. Martin will get on that in
the next novel anyway, one of the other elements. Oh
my gosh, now I want to hear a full version
of the Game of Thrones theme with all those all
(21:44):
the notes just replaced by someone singing hot pockets. At
any rate. You may have also heard some stories back
in December about the amazing vending machines in the future
that use facial recognition software and hardware. Except here's the thing.
All of the articles I was reading was like, it's
the first vitting machine to use that, and I said,
shenanigans because I specifically remember covering this for tech stuff,
(22:09):
the fact that facial recognition hardware has been a part
of vending machines in certain parts of the world for
several years. You know, I basically almost never say something
was the first of something, because every time somebody says
something like that, they turned out to be wrong. Yeah,
then that's the call for shenanigans, and then the second
for shenanigans, and then we all grab our rooms. Uh So,
(22:31):
back in two thousand eight, there was a Japanese company
that introduced some vending machines that had facial recognition hardware
and software for age verification, specifically to vend cigarettes. The
age in Japan for the legal purchase of cigarettes is twenty.
So what they did was they built this facial recognition
hardware into the vending machines that, in theory, would look
(22:54):
at a person's face and look for features that you
would expect in someone who is over the age of
twenty and who smokes so wrinkles, some sagging flesh. I'm
not making this up. It was really looking for things
that we're not associated with a young looking face, and
if the face were to match, then that would be
(23:14):
an indicator that, yes, this person is allowed to buy cigarettes.
I mean, could you just kind of hold up a potato, No,
but you could hold up a photo. In fact, there
was a there was a reporter. Was this the photo
of Bruce Willis that fooled the machine? It's one of
the photos they used was of Bruce Willis. It wasn't
the only one, however, there was a reporter with song
K Sports that went around and looked at various vending
(23:37):
machines in different cities in Japan, trying different types of photographs.
One was of I think, there was one that was
a man in his fifties. There was another one there's
a woman in her thirties. And depending upon the size
of the photo, it seemed to work pretty well. Like
if you're if your photo was too small, it would
no longer work them, it wouldn't full the machine. But
(23:58):
the photo was of a large enough size, and we're
just talking about a few inches where you can hold
it up to the camera at a appropriate distance. Although
it should be said that this was not the only
method of age verification that the machines were using, right uh.
Cigarette machines in general in Japan tend to have another
form of age verification. You have to have something called
a taskbo card. Taskbo, by the way, it stands for
(24:20):
tobacco passport. It's a it's a I'm going to cancer country.
It's flavor country. It's flavor country. It really is terrible anyway.
Taskbo cards are an age verification cards where you've you've
had to apply for it and prove your age and
then you get the card as an r F I
D chip inside of it. So that way you would
(24:41):
use that tap that while uh, while purchase, making your
purchase to prove that you are in fact of the
age that is allowed to purchase cigarettes legally. So um, yeah,
you would probably need one of those as well as
the the picture of Bruce Willis for you to order
your your um illicit cigarettes when you are a young Um,
(25:04):
don't smoke kids, so but really you're one stop shop
for this would be stealing Bruce Willis's passport or just
stealing Bruce Willis. It's not don't if you're not going
to smoke. Also, just don't kidnap Bruce Willis guys. But
if you are going to smoke, you might as well
kill I see, I see your point. Now that's perfect logic.
(25:26):
I think it's just think everything about that was wrong.
We can move on. There were there were more of
these though. Yeah. There was another story about Japanese vending
machines that could detect gender and age range based on
face recognition hardware and software. And these were beverage machines
so not not cigarette machines. So why would you want
to detect someone's gender and age? Well, these machines would
(25:49):
give recommendations of what drinks a person might like based
upon their demographics. That sounds totally offensive, It does, doesn't it.
So yeah, they said that their market research showed that
young men liked sweeter drinks than middle aged men, for example,
so the drinks that it would suggest would be moral
on the lines of the sweet drinks that their their
(26:09):
market research has shown women tend to prefer. Now, you
could choose anything, you weren't forced into whatever was suggested
for you, and those suggestions would also change depending upon
things like how late in the day it was it
and what was the temperature outside, so something like if
it was a hotter day, it might uh, it might
suggest a more quote unquote refreshing beverage um that kind
(26:31):
of stuff, so the lemonade instead of you who okay now.
According to a spokesperson for the J. R. East Water
Business Company, the new machines saw three times as much
traffic as their older machines that did not have this software.
It could not make these recommendations. I'm sure the novelty
factor was it was probably part of it. May have
(26:53):
even been that people started to discover beverages they never
tried before and really enjoyed them, and then didn't nowhere
else to get them at the were hooked to the system. Uh.
In fourteen, that's when we saw a lot more stories
about vending machines with facial recognition capabilities. And this was
when the technology was kind of breaking out of Japanese
vending machines and making its way into ones in the
(27:13):
in the United States, United Kingdom, places like that. And
of course it was being reported like it was all
brand new in the first time ever anyone did it ever?
Trust me, if we're talking about technology, you want to
look to Japan before you make that statement. Uh. Anyway,
these machines can market to you based upon your appearance,
very similar to the one we just talked about in
(27:35):
twenty ten in Japan. But beyond that, if you frequent
a particular machine, you could end up being recognized by
that machine actually has facial recognition software. Oh so it's like, oh, hey, Jonathan,
I see your back. Yeah, and I know that you
have a habit of buying this particular drink, So would
you do you want that again? Here's just your one
stop shop. You just push this little button, you're gonna
(27:57):
get exactly what you want. Also, users who frequently ordered
the Strength also frequently ordered this drink also by nine
in your tenth ones free right exactly. You can get
loyalty programs. A lot of this is leveraging stuff that
has been proven to work in other areas. So, for example,
the you might also like very similar to Amazon right,
and the loyalty programs are just like everything. Like, if
(28:18):
you've ever gone to any coffee shop, there's probably a
loyalty program there. Uh, and lots of other retail establishments
use that same sort of model. So why not vending
machines And this is one of the things that that
the facial recognition hardware might allow people to do. You
might think it's a little creepy that the machine knows
who you are and what you like, but on the
(28:39):
flip side, it may mean that you don't have to
surf through you know, twenty other choices that are not
valid to your your needs and you just get immediately
what you want when you want it. So it all
depends on your perspective. You know, I don't know how
much there is to this, but I at least saw
some sensational looking headlines about future vending machines that will
(28:59):
be designed to food shame you. Yeah. Yeah, there's actually
I've seen some stuff too that I don't know if
it was based upon any specific reports or if it
was just sort of a conjecture, well, experiment, that's a
generous way. Well, if these machines recognize you, then they
(29:20):
can keep databases of information about you and your family members,
and and they can recommend products to your really chubby
but and maybe they look at you and say you
don't look like you need a Snickers, or or say like, like,
you look like you've given up, let me give you two. Yeah,
I'm about to say, I don't think there's ever gonna
be a machine that's gonna say like, no, I'm not
(29:42):
going to sell anything to you. It's kind of empathetical
to the whole purpose that now I might say, you
don't really want that thing, you want this other thing
that would be better for you. It also happens to
be twice as expensive that I could totally see. But
there's also some concerns that it could be hooked into
things like medical records. So let's say that you are
someone who has diabetes and you come up to the machine.
The machine will not show you anything that could potentially
(30:05):
cause you harm. On the one hand, that sounds like
it's a responsible thing. On the other hand, anytime you
have any sort of point of contact that has access
to things like medical records, that's a potential vulnerability and
a huge security concern. Yeah. No. Also, I mean I
bulk at the very idea that that in this our
(30:25):
free society, we are not allowed to kill ourselves slowly
with the things that we can see. Well, maybe it
would be something like Lauren. You would walk up to
it, it it would say, Laura, no, you don't really want
that particular treat because that's going to make you stabby, stabby,
So let's have this other treat that's gonna make you
happy happy. I don't know. It might be like Lauren, warning,
this has lots of peppers in it. Well, that would
(30:46):
be a good one. I would totally take that kind
of warning, like, hey, yeah, it could be something like
allergies as well. I mean, that's that's a total possibility.
But you know what I would prefer is when you
walk up to it, if you were making a profile,
for example, you might say, oh, I'm allergic to peanuts
for example. Then then it could avoid from that moment
(31:07):
on with facial recognition saying oh, this person happens to
allergic to peanuts. There's no connecting to any kind of
medical database in that sense. You've just set up a
profile with preferences and things that you should not have. Granted,
if you're allergic to peanuts, you probably don't want to
get something from a vending machine that has a lot
of stuff that has peanuts in it. Anyway, you can
try the new Snickers that has salt cod instead of peanuts,
(31:29):
the Ludfisk stickers. This also sounds like the kind of
thing that I would I would just go up to
with like pictures of all of my friends and teach
the machine like this person only likes salt card. Them
likes the super sour gummy worms. That's all. That's the
only thing they ever want. Well, let's let's talk about
(31:50):
some some of the weird and extravagant vending machines I
came across while doing research on this topic. You know,
I saw these notes you wrote Jonathan, and it's like, well,
obviously Jonathan has been had by some people pulling April
Fools pranks. No, I did extensive research that makes certain
these things really did app Yeah, so let's say that
(32:12):
you are you know, you're a mover and or a shaker,
and uh, you are one of the hot people. And
of course you're living in Beverly Hills, because where else
would you live? And there you decide, you know what,
I'm in the mall and I really want some caviar.
So I'm just gonna walk up to this vending machine
that sells caviare at s Cargo and plunk in about
(32:32):
five bucks for some caviar. The beluga caviare sells for
five ounce. You can buy an ounce of beluga caviar
for five dollars at one of these vending machines. You know,
knock yourself out. And also, in case you're worried about
looking ghosh eating your caviar with a plastic spoon from
(32:53):
the food court, you can also buy a mother of
Pearl spoon to go with that, so that way, you know, well,
that's good, I'm glad, I'm relieved. So you actually keep
the spoon or do you just like put a deposit
on I think I think, well you can either keep
it or you just toss it to the side. Because
everything in your life is disposable, so um, then obviously
(33:18):
you would probably use some sort of crack card or
NFC device, because I don't think anyone wants to sit
there feeding five one dollar bills and I gotta get
that caveat four hours later. Oh, it's gonna be so good.
So there are vending machines in China that sell live
crabs a life crabs. You know, I thought the life
(33:38):
crab must be some special kind of device and chose
not to correct. I am so happy that not only
did you choose not to correct it, but I chose
to go ahead and call it out anyway. It should
be live crabs in our notes, not life life crabs. No,
but live crabs almost as interesting as life crabs. If
(33:58):
there was a machine that just said life crabs in
that just to see what happens. I'm kind of with
you on that one, Joe. In this case, they are
crabs that are alive, and but the the vending machine
itself is chilled so that they are, you know, dormant.
(34:18):
But which is good because I'm not sure. Yeah, having
a live and active crab dispensed out of a vending machine,
while entertaining, would probably not have the results you were
hoping for. And obviously you would use this to buy
a crab and then take an omen and eat it.
Oh man, what a horror when the crab machine breaks down. Yeah,
(34:39):
well you could always go to the lobster machine. And
I'm not making that up either. There was actually, at
first I thought was only a single restaurant in Las Vegas,
but apparently at some point or another there were about
eight of these machines along the Vegas Strip and in
Fremont as well. And they are serious a lobster machine.
I'm absolutely serious. Yeah, as it. You know those crap
(35:01):
those claw games that you see in the arcades where
they have like the stuffed animals and stuff. Yeah, so
it's one of those, except it has live lobsters, main
lobsters in it. It's a saltwater tank with a claw
at the top and a joystick that controls the claw.
You put two bucks in, you maneuver the claw, you
push the button, the claw goes down if it grabs
(35:21):
a lobster and places it in the bucket. Typically they
would take a picture of you with the lobster and
then cook it up for you for free, for free. Yeah,
this particular restaurant I was looking at they did that
for free, Like, so your lobster meal would cost two bucks.
On the first truck crane games, they pick up a
(35:41):
stuffed animal. How could they pick up The very first
time I ever played a crane game, I won a
stuffed animal the very first time. How many times have
I won something since then? Zero? I used to go
to a laundromat that had a crane game full of knives.
That's almost as good as the lobsters. I I want
(36:03):
to put in that, like, I'm offended on a humanity
level that that there are claw games with live animals
in them. I'm not I'm not even that touchy feely
a lobster. It's a cockroach that lives underwater. I am
aware of that. I'm just saying like, that's like I
am not like a member of Peter or anything like that.
(36:23):
I left out the machine and include that one. But no,
I'm just there was not a puppy ending. Let's talk
about something else about pizza. So the let's pizza veending machines.
These took off in Italy and also I believe you
can find them in the UK. I don't know if
they're ay in the United States, but these are vending
(36:45):
machines that make a pizza for you to order when
you order it, so there's not like a bunch of
cheese pizzas that just get heated up and then serve
to you. Instead, when you put your money in and
you make your selection, let's say you want a pepperoni pizza,
then it'll will go ahead and mix flour and water
together to make dough. It'll need that dough, it'll roll,
(37:05):
roll the dough out, put the sauce, the cheese, the
pepperoni on your pizza, cook it with an infrared oven,
and the whole thing. The whole process supposedly takes about
three minutes from start to finish, and then you get
your own like made to order pepperoni pizza. I have
no idea if it's any good, but when I looked
(37:26):
at that, I was like, I kind of want to
try one, just to just to kind of experience it
and see if is this How does it stack up
to the three D printed pizza? Yeah? Really that's the
real question. Yeah, obviously there is a taste test that
is in need, and I think for thinking is up
to the task. Um. And then they're also French fry
vending machines to go with your pizza. This was one
(37:48):
of those things that when I heard about him, like,
please tell me that it fries the fries right then
and there, because I can't stand the thought of just
stale French fries. Yeah, nothing worse than French. That's pretty awful.
So in case, these are actually frozen fries that are
flash fried when you put in your money. I supposedly
these are vending machines that you can find in Australia.
(38:09):
So you put your money in flash fries, the fries
serves them up to you in a little little container
and you can take your fries and munch them on
the way home. And I decided to end this list.
There's tons of stuff we can talk about. I mean,
just just to panel alone. Oh sure, sure, well, I
mean even here in Atlanta there's a cupcake vending machine.
Yeah yeah, there there are a couple of different cupcake
(38:30):
vending machines that I came across when I was looking,
and they even can put sprinkles on them. But the
one I was looking at the in Paris you can
buy baguettes from vending machines. So if you want your yes,
I mean, it makes perfect sense for for Paris, uh,
now we get to a point where we start talking
about whether or not there's actually a future for vending machines.
(38:53):
And the reason why we even have this discussion is
when Joe first brought up this listener mail and said
we should do this. My first reaction was at vending machines,
how are they relevant now? Because I was thinking about
another story that broke recently here in Atlanta. Atlanta is
one of the markets where Amazon is rolling out its
(39:14):
Prime Now service, which is where if you're an Amazon
Prime member, you can order something and for free, you
can get the delivery within two hours for certain items,
and for an additional fee, you can get it within
an hour of ordering it. And I thought, in a
world where I can sit at home and order whatever
it is I want and get it within an hour
(39:34):
without leaving my house, why would I even care about
vending machines. I mean, we had talked about the potential
for vending machines to replace brick and mortar stores. They
have a much lower footprint, much smaller footprints. So obviously
there's that that has a big, you know, attractive factor
to it. But then I was thinking, but I don't
(39:55):
don't you have to leave my house, and I thought, wait,
sometimes I do leave my house, and those rare occasions
when I leave my house and I'm somewhere else, I
might want to get something and yet not talk to anybody.
How can I do that without becoming the most you know,
socially awkward or stand offish person. Well, vending machines. That's
(40:16):
a great solution, right, I can get the stuff I
need from a vending machine while I'm out and about
and yet not have to interface talk to a person. Yeah,
I think it had broad her since this is sort
of the question about where and when commerce is going
to happen in the future, because a just one example,
(40:37):
a perhaps unfortunate fact for people who work as cashiers
is that like determining the cost of an item and
then accepting payment and then making change are all tasks
that are pretty easy to automate, as we've seen from
the self check outlines at the grocery store or the
hardware store. Yeah, and it's it's kind of strange in
(41:00):
my opinion that there are still as many cashiers left
with jobs as there are. I mean, I'm sorry to
say that. I don't mean like that cashiers can do
all kinds of great things that that computers can't do.
You know, they can help you, you know, they can
interact with you personally, and they can take stuff out
to your car for you. Um, they do provide a
(41:21):
lot of services that can't be automated. But it just
seems like, I don't know businesses that are in the
mindset of, you know, let's slash all the features and
get it down to the bare bones. I think there's
gonna be a lot of that going on, a lot
of automation of the selling point kind of tasks there.
(41:41):
But coupled that with the sort of increasing demand to
scale down physical space, especially in urban areas, and the
approach of on demand manufacturing, and it seems to me
like you've got a recipe for an economy in which
vending machines replace many kinds of other or traditional points
(42:01):
of sale like stores and kiosks and stuff. One example
that I thought about was books. I mean, think about
what happens when you buy a new book and let's
say you know, you're not exactly so yeah, let's say
you want a paper book and not the book kind,
(42:21):
and there are still bookstores. You know, you can go
out to a Barnes and Noble or something that pulped
dead trees. They're great. I've heard tell of such places.
So imagine you're the person Jonathan that would walk into
a book start and buy a new copy of a book.
Why wouldn't that store be replaced with a book vending machine?
(42:42):
And it doesn't need to hold copies of every book
that there could possibly be in the store. It just
needs digital memory banks, paper cover material, glue ink. You
know that's about printed demands. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You key
in your selection, authorized payment, the machine prints out and
binds your book in a few minutes. I mean, how
(43:04):
many other types of products could this be applied to
with with three D printing and all kinds of technology
like that, Shure. I do imagine that it would probably
take longer than a few minutes, depending on how long
the book is. But even so, you could have to
be looking at like things that have to dry, like inconglue, right,
But you could totally have it be a thing where
you make your order, you go do something else, and
(43:26):
when you come back, your book is done, and then
you put in a little code and it drops your
book in. Like I could see that, like there even
if you have the objection of some of these things
we propose take more time to put together than just
a few minutes, using the technology of creating a unique
code identifier for each consumer, so that when your order
(43:47):
is ready, you just go up and it's just like
the old vending machines where you want to get that
candy bar, you put your code in, but instead of
it opening up so that it you know, or unraveling
so your candy bar falls down, it drops the appropriate
order into the receptacle and then you pick it up
and probably you wouldn't even have to enter your code.
It would just scan your eyeball or your brain, implanet
(44:08):
arrify d chip or oh yeah, I remember this guy,
he has terrible tasted books. Yeah. Yeah, here's your Dan Brown,
here's your tech war. There you go. No, I I
totally see your point, Joe, And like especially part of
part of a distant future, as you know, one of
those moves towards automating all of these low skill jobs
(44:30):
and letting people do more creative, fulfilling jobs. Uh, which
is hypothetically great, um, but you know, at risk of
sounding completely obvious, just because something can be automated doesn't
mean that it's necessarily easier. Easier, It certainly doesn't mean
that it's cheaper, um, and it might not even be
more desirable. I mean, if you suggested to the owner
(44:53):
of a privately owned second hand bookstore that they buy
a robot instead of manning the desk themselves, well, I
guess it depends on the temperament of the bookstore owner.
Like you know that black and black books, Yeah, I mean,
but but I but I would I would argue that
black and black books his main pleasure in life comes
from being disdainful to people who come into his bookshop. Yeah,
(45:15):
but he could just sit outside side and drink wine
and be disdainful of people as they walk into his bookshop.
I suppose that's true either either way. I imagine that
you would elicit a strong response from from that sort
of suggestion, and I would pose it that there is
something to be said for having the human element in
small daily interactions. There's been a whole bunch of psychological
(45:36):
research done on the types of societies in which automated
vending has taken off, and the effects of not interacting
with humans is often um. The results of those psychological
studies of course, are like, we don't know yet. More
research needs to be done, as often happens in psychological studies.
UM and as far as the expense goes, I wanted
(45:56):
to bring up an interesting application of automated vending. This
is a This is an automated robotic library at the
University of Chicago. It uses this huge robotic system to
retrieve materials. UM. Its stacks take up one seven of
the usual space, which is pretty cool. Uh. It's reading
room is huge and light filled and gorgeous because you
(46:17):
don't have to worry about the kind of uh the
kind of light issues that that sensitive materials have. You know,
it can store those sensitive materials much more carefully, with
much less interaction with unnecessary dirty librarian hands, all the
oils and stuff that could damage the materials. Sure that
there's still library staff, of course, to help you out
(46:39):
and and help you figure out what you're looking for
and how to find it. Umture of libraries. Someday we
absolutely should. And the thing only cost like one million dollars,
easily within every library's budget. Yeah, the big, big money
making uh organizations that are libraries. I keep wanting to say,
(47:03):
libraries just just to be just to be contrary, well,
you know, any library is expensive, given that the containment
systems for dangerous librarians. Yes, all the librarians with their
clowd hands and their habit of of Uh, you don't
listen to night Vale, do you Jo? Yeah, librarians are
pretty terrifying creatures, as welcome to night Failure also in
(47:26):
real life. So I know librarians, they are terrifying. They're
awesome in the true sense of the word. They inspire
awe Anyway, one of the other things I wanted to
mention is that if we do move to a future
where vending becomes more of a commonplace sort of means
of getting materials when you are products, services, whatever, I
(47:49):
guess it'd have to be good. So, I mean, you
might get a coupon for a service that way. But
if that happens to be more prevalent in the future,
there are other questions this brings up. I mean, obviously,
what happens to the people who would otherwise be employed
by the brick and mortar versions of the stores, which
we've kind of touched upon. That is of question that
we don't necessarily have an answer to. I mean, ideally, yes,
(48:11):
they get better jobs doing something else, but that's kind
of a pie in the sky, idealized world answer, not
a real world answer. Also, what happens to the space
of the brick and mortar stores that go out of
business when something like this, where you have the combination
of services like Amazon Prime Now and vending machines out
in public, When all of that is meeting many of
(48:33):
our needs, maybe not all of them, but enough of them,
what happens to all the space for the stores that
used to do those things. What do we turn that into.
That's a really interesting question that we can't really answer here.
We didn't prepare for that, But I think that could
be a fun episode in the future to talk about.
As we get more efficient, as we create these new
(48:55):
on demand services that can do things like create furniture
or books or whatever you might think of in these
these this on demand manufacturing world, what do we do
with all the space that used to be there just
to hold the stuff? Build more apartments and water slides.
I am in favor of the water slides, uh, depending
(49:17):
upon where in town you want to put those apartments.
I've got some strong opinions about that, but that's because
of traffic in my neighborhood anyway, Uh, I am curious
about that. I think we should do an episode at
some point about, you know, some of the other perhaps
uh problems that we don't really necessarily consider that could
(49:37):
go along with this amazing vision of the future. What
what do we do with that? And if it all
turns out to be water slides? That's an awesome conversation
all by itself. I'm also curious what our listeners think.
What do you think about live crabs or live crabs,
Live crabs and librarians. That should be the title of
this episode, which would make no sense whatsoever, But I'm
(49:58):
okay with that Occasionally, UM, I probably won't call it
life crabs and Librarians, But I am curious what you
guys think about vending machines, also, just the idea of
what happens to the people and the space that would
normally be dedicated to things that vending machines could potentially replace.
Do you think there is a future? Do you think
(50:18):
this whole vending machine thing is one of those deals
that's always going to have like a niche, but it's
never going to get bigger than that. That's a valid response,
but I'm curious what you guys think. Also, if you
have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, I'd
like to hear those as well. Can you get in
touch with us by writing us an email. The address
is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or
(50:40):
drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.
At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking at Facebook.
Just search fw thinking in the search bar will pop up.
You can join the conversations and as a message, we
read all of them. We really enjoy them. Keep them coming.
We'll talk to you again really soon. For more on
(51:03):
this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking
dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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