Invention Playlist 4: The Vending Machine

It took my quarters and gave me candy, but who invented this machine? Find out...

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Episode Transcript

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Subscribe now, Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert

(01:28):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and you might know us
from our other podcast, Stuff to Blow your Mind. But
today you have apparently wandered into our Hall of cursed inventions.
Oh wait, it's not all cursed inventions. Cursed, you know.
I mean, so some things are perfectly fine inventions. So
some of them make our lives better, But or they

(01:49):
taunt you with goods that you could almost reach. Robert,
did you when you were a kid, did you ever
play that game? I suppose it was a game, but
I took it very serious sleep where you really thought
you could reach up through the bottom of the vending
machine and get that food item from the bottom row.
I do not remember trying too hard at it, because

(02:10):
it ultimately seemed like there were there were too many risks,
both both physical and social, because either you are going
to get your arm caught in there or jammed or pinched. Uh,
there're just gonna be some sort of trap or fail safe,
or you're just gonna be seen doing it and you're
gonna get in trouble for trying to steal from a
candy machine. It always seemed like a kind of humiliating

(02:33):
Homer Simpson escaway to die would be you die accidentally
pulling the vending machine over on top of you while
you're trying to reach up and grab some andy cap
hot fries from the bottom row exactly. And you know,
these are two key points though that we're gonna we're
gonna come back to again and again in this episode.
In this episode, we are talking about the vending machine
a k a. The robot cashier. That's right, So time

(02:56):
was back in the olden days, olden days when you
had to either buy goods directly from a human salesperson
that sounds horrible, or you simply had to leave payment
after you took off with it. And as as far
as that payment goes prior to the invention of money,
which would be which have to be another episode for us.
But you'd have to leave goods there and you know,

(03:16):
and exchange some sort of a barter system. Well, that
sounds difficult if you can't work out what the exchange
rate for what you're bringing is. Sor right. In either
case though there's a human interaction, or there's some there's
some human judgment on what is fair, or there's just
some sort of an honor system in place, or or
a human there just to prevent you from stealing. Right,

(03:36):
But then what about a machine that sells goods for you,
something that has become so ubiquitous now it's fascinated to
think back on on where the shift occurs we get
into this vending machine territory. Just where does such a
machine come from? At what point do we cross over
from machines that are ultimately a little more than honor boxes,

(03:59):
you know, honor system situations where you're just trusted to
leave your money and take exactly what you paid for.
And then where do we get into true mechanical sellers. Right.
The honor box system is what you would often find
in say a church where they'll be selling prayer candles
or something like that, and there's a little offering box
and it's like, you know, please put a dollar in
and don't just take all the candles, and and and Yeah,

(04:22):
the honor system is enforced by the sacred nature of
the space and your obligations there. There's a supernatural security
guard in that case. Yeah, you don't have to worry about,
you know, somebody trying to reach their hand in there.
Just make off with all the candles for the most part,
but you really do have to worry about that if
say you want to sell minor food items snack items,

(04:45):
and say you're running a concession stand at the pool
side or something like that, and you need to run
off to put some money in the parking meter. I
don't know whatever whatever the people maaming those concessions stands
had to do when they put up the sign that
said be right back. So, so kids are coming, they
want to buy an ice cream bar or a Snickers
or something like that, and the goods are just right there.

(05:08):
Do you trust the children to leave money on the
counter as they should and take things and take only
what they've actually paid for. Wouldn't it be better if
you had a machine that enforced the exchange of currency
for for payout of items and didn't allow kids to
sneak an extra hot fries here and there. Now, of
course that as we're talking about honor boxes here, one

(05:30):
of the important things to notice that, uh, you still
find plenty of honor boxes out on the street in
the form of newspaper honor boxes. Oh, the newspaper vending machines.
You put your money in, and if you wanted, yes,
you could take all the newspapers that would be cumbersome.
How often does somebody want more than one newspaper though,

(05:52):
unless they're like, there's an article about them in it. Right.
But but obviously you could not do the same with
say a you know, a Cola machine or child Clinton machine.
Now I wonder something that we can maybe come back
to in a bit, because I wonder how the psychology
of transaction and the psychology of consumer behavior changes when
you're dealing with the machine versus with a person. Because

(06:13):
I think back to my childhood self, who you know,
I would reach my arm up in the machine and
see if I could grab whatever, a brisk tea out
of the drink machine, or grab something out of the
snack machine. I don't think I was ever able to
do anything like that, but I would try, and I
would never do that at even even if the concession

(06:34):
stand attendant was away and I could have just reached
out and stolen whatever I wanted, I would never have
done that at a real concession stand that was not
controlled by machine operated mechanisms. It's a different scenario entirely.
And then at the same time, it's it's ultimately not
it's still somebody's property that is for sale. They're still

(06:54):
individuals involved in this scenario and you are defrauding them. Well,
I felt completely legitimate to try to reach into the
machine and steal from it in a way that it
wouldn't from a place that had a human even if
they weren't there right now, right, because you would have
been exploiting a design flaw. Right, Yeah, I guess so
that maybe that makes it okay, it doesn't to be clear.

(07:16):
But but let's go back in time a bit. Let's
let's look for the roots of the vending machine. So
I was reading through an excellent book on the social
history the vending machine titled Vending Machines on American Social
History by Carrie C. Grave, and uh. It points out
that the you know, the first American vending machines popped
up in the eighteen eighties, but the earliest mention of

(07:39):
what we can reasonably describe as a vending machine is
attributed to the Greek inventor Hero or Heron, the Alexandrian
engineer of the first century. See Okay, now, Hero has
tons of inventions attributed to him, right, and then the
book that the stems from is loaded with descriptions of

(08:00):
strange devices. So Uh. This the sixty two c e
book Newmatica has descriptions and illustrations of various curios, fountains,
temple gadgets, you know, doors that open due to the
you know, some sort of movement of steam or fire
or water. Uh, with entries like a drinking horn in

(08:21):
which a peculiarly formed siphon is fixed and uh, water
driven from the mouth of a wine skin in the
hands of a satyr by means of compressed air. So
a lot of curios and marvels, toys essentially, And so
it sounds like he designed one of those early on
like peeing fountains right exactly, you know, which would would

(08:41):
would have been technological wonders then and there are still
kind of technological wonders today. But where does the vending
machine come in. Well, he describes and illustrates a coin
operated device for for selling sacred water in Egyptian temples. Okay,
so the idea is it's maybe you don't believe in
the honor box. Is them like we discussed for buying
candles in a church or something. Maybe you think, well,

(09:04):
people are just going to be stealing sacred water if
we don't make them pay for it, So you need
a machine to enforce that transaction. Well, I don't know
how much of it was, because I think there is
still an honor. So I mean, it's a temple, right,
but maybe there's a sense of let's make it a
little wondrous, you know, because a number of these devices
are kind of like that, like the doors open, uh,

(09:25):
you know, as if by sacred magic. But of course
it's supposedly caused by you know, some sort of heat apparatus.
But but here's how this device would work. Okay, You'd
insert a five drop MA coin and the coin would
tip a balance inside which would lift a plug and
allow a small amount of water to escape and then
pour into your chalice or cup or what have you.

(09:47):
And then once the coin makes its way into the
collection chamber, the balancer turns and the plug goes back
into place. Okay, so it sounds like a very simple design.
You've got like a lever, and when the weight of
the coin hits one side the lever, like a seesaw,
it lifts the plug up and it's kind of like
a toilet. Actually, it is very much like a modern toilet,

(10:07):
especially when you when you see the illustration it basically
functions like a coin operated flush. Nice uh. And I
should also point out that said Chakrain also discusses this
in his American Scientist article water Fountains with Special Effects
from two thousand five. But it's still certainly benefited from
an honor system of sorts. So you know, the gods
are watching, so you're not going to try and cheat

(10:29):
the machine with you know, some sort of a coin
on a string or some some smooth stones that are
just happened to be shaped like a five drop mc cooin, right,
because this was not a refined system of judging what
had been put into the slot. It was basically anything
that could push the lever down. Right. Now, in terms
of like who actually invented this and whether it was

(10:51):
actually Bill, this is a little more difficult to to
really figure out. It's certainly possible that Hero himself was
indeed the inventor of the divide, but we don't know
for sure. It might have been to Cbious, reputed inventor
of water clocks from to seventy b C, who also
would have resided in Alexandria. To Cbs as water clocks
are worth looking up. By the way, I was looking

(11:13):
at some videos of how these things worked, and there
was some ingenious design because it's difficult to design a
consistent water clock that just keeps working the same over
time because you know your your reservoir tank strained down.
So he created that these really smart designs with like
extra reservoir tanks that would pour into your main reservoir

(11:35):
tank and then a siphon to manage how high the
water level was is really clever. Now, we also don't
know if what Hero describes here was ever actually built
or if it's just you know, a novel design. Uh.
And this is the case with a lot of old
technological gadgets that you described in books. And then on
top of this, some mentions of this vending machine include

(11:55):
embellishments that are difficult to nail down or simply don't
fit the timeline. But it does give us an idea
of of what some of the earliest, if not the
an actual vending machine consisted of, then at least the
earliest ideas of what a vending machine could be. Right,
the general principle of automating a transaction without just relying

(12:16):
on the honor system on the buyer's part, right, and
it's it's kind of a gradual evolution to get to
that point. Uh. However, as a Seagraft points out, it's
gonna be a long time after after this, uh, this
temple device described a hero before we actually get any
real advancements in vending machine technology. He does point out

(12:37):
there there's some For instance, there's an uncredited nineteen sixty
New York Times article that claims, among other things, that
there was a coin operated pencil selling machine in ten
seventies six China. You know, I was really holding out
for that medieval European vending machine that you put in
a coin and dispenses a piece of the true cross. Well,
I mean, there were certainly automatons throughout European history, and

(12:59):
I guess at the vending machine, especially the early days
of the vending machine, you're looking very for a very
particular type of automaton that does something, or rather not
just does something, uh you know, but actually gives some
sort of good in exchange, either you know, leaks out
some sort of valuable liquid or gives you a candy
bar in exchange for a coin. Because we have all

(13:21):
matter of amazing automatons of showing up in European history
and everything from pooping ducks to praying monks. But to
what extent you have things that are actually facilitating an
exchange of money for goods? All right, we'll take a
quick break and then when we come back, we will
discuss more of the history of the vending machine. Today's

(13:45):
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(15:12):
brought to you by the U. S Department of Health,
that Human Services Administration for Children and Families, and the
Act Council. All right, we're back. So according to c. Grave, quote,
nothing happened in the vending industry until the seventeenth century UM,
and that's when you had snuff and tobacco boxes pop
up in England around sixteen fifteen. And these were definitely

(15:35):
on our system devices, not unlike newspaper boxes and they've
been they were just filled with various tobacco products instead.
So it would be kind of like you pay for
access to them, but you could take as much as
you wanted, right, Yeah, like you you you pay your money,
you fill your pipe and you move on. You don't
fill your pockets, you just fill your pipe, and then

(15:55):
you had you had other instances of early advancements in
the use of vending machine technology. Uh. A couple of
centuries later, two English bookseller Richard Carlisle tried a vending
machine for books in order to avoid arrest for selling
certain blasphemous publications. And uh, wait a minute, Okay, so

(16:18):
he's saying, like, I didn't sell it, Yeah, a machine
sold it nice. However, he was still held responsible and
one of his employees was convicted for selling blasphemous literature
via the machine. Uh. Now it's unknown of the thing
was truly automatic or this was basically another honor box system,
but it is kind of one of these early examples

(16:38):
of who is to blame when a machine sells something
that is illicit. This is something that has fascinated me
for a while. I can think of examples, not necessarily
with selling, but uh, I think about the experiment from
several years back, the random Darknet shopper, which was this
program that people came up with where you could load
it with some some budget, give it some money and

(17:00):
then say go a little thing, just go out onto
the dark web and buy randomly. So you know, then
they got in trouble because obviously it bought drugs, bought
whatever kinds of illicit materials. But then they could say, well,
we didn't tell it to buy drugs. We just gave
it money and released it into the wild, So how
can you say we did something illegal? Now, more strides

(17:23):
were made in the tobacco honor box arena, but the
next area of exploration and patent in England happened to
be stamps. Eighteen fifty seven, Simi and Denim applied for
a patent for a quote self acting machine for the
delivery of postage and receipt stamps, but it would be
another thirty years before any real headway was made in
this area. Now, the first U S patent for a

(17:46):
vending machine was a liquid distribution machine that actually sounds
a lot like like Heroes fabulous Temple water distributor or
kind of liquid though, um, well, it's interesting when we
start looking at the like the early distribt you should
of liquids in these machines like they're essentially fountains that
are going to uh distribute drinking water, such as cold

(18:07):
drinking water, or later it's going to be things like beer.
That makes sense. Now. By the early twentieth century, gum
and candy machines began taking off. Now. One of the
machines featured in Cgret's book is an amazingly creepy clown head.
This thing is from hell. It is this very round

(18:28):
Oh my god, it's face. It looks kind of like
an one e the Japanese only that kind of demon,
but much worse, uh, much more kind of It's got
these creepy, sleepy eyes that are like, when I wake up,
I will come kill you. Well, it doesn't help that
the coin slot is kind of protruding from one side

(18:49):
of the forehead, as if it's a devil with only
one horn, right, yes, yeah, an asymmetric devil. And it's
got this white ring around its mouth. Is just an
absolute terror. Yeah, and then you pull the gum from
its teeth of course, uh, like I was chewing that um.
Welcome to your house tonight. Now. Already at this point

(19:13):
there were designer concerns with the use of slugs and
hairpins to cheat the machines. So the idea of a
slug is what we mentioned earlier. It's like a weighted
device that you put on a string or something and
put it into the machine and activate the coin detection
without actually paying. Yeah, I mean you get into this
whole thing like it. It's not like the machine is
reading the coin. It's reading a coin shaped piece of metal.

(19:36):
So if you have a coin shaped piece of metal
that has no intrinsic value, then whammo, you got yourself
a piece of gum, right, you know, Because it comes
down to be basically, whatever kind of honor system works
with a proper English pipe, tobacco box or the whole
you know, the holy water for sale in the temple.
A clown head that spits gum at the local train

(19:58):
station is not going to benefit from the same holy reverence.
You know though, I do wonder if they're onto something
here with the clown head, because this is personified, it's
looking right at you. It's anthropomorphic, and I think that
could play an important role in the relationship between the
buyer and the vendor. When the vendor is just like

(20:19):
a rectangular machine that you need to put a coin in,
it would you be more or less likely to try
to defraud that machine, then you would a machine that
looks like a creepy, demonic entity that could follow you home.
It's true. You know. You had another twist on this though,
is that you also saw charitable vending machines pop up
in late nineteenth century France, which when this seems like

(20:42):
a decent way to invoke the honor system for machines
that can't really defend themselves. You know, it's like, yes,
you're buying gum or what have you from a crappy
machine that you could probably defraud, but the money is
going to charity. So how much of a monster are
you really? You might be surprised now, speaking of defrauding machines,

(21:02):
the earliest record of a vandalized machine, according to Segrave,
comes from seven in England. Three young men were convicted
for using brass discs to buy cigarettes. And then there's
also at Louis Account where a man had a coin
on a string and he was using it to score
cigars out of a machine and it was creating quite
a stir. People were coming around to watch him do it,

(21:24):
like he was performing some sort of magic trick. And
the judge in this case, he wasn't even sure if
this was larceny and ended up just finding the man
for disorderly conduct instead. Again coming back to that same conundrum,
how do I how do I punish a man for
stealing from an inhuman entity? Yeah, stealing from a machine,
really stealing. Now, another concern, of course with all this

(21:47):
is that today we have problems with vending machines not
working properly. You know, you go to you put in
your money, you expect to get a candy bar, and
it like sticks to the side, right, So obviously you
had similar issues back in the day with these clumsier machines.
I'd imagine even more often, right, Like you try to
get the gum out of the clown's mouth, but instead
it just kind of makes a grinding noise. Yes, and uh,

(22:12):
I think one of the more I mean, when you
look at the history of vending machines, on one hand,
you see like the definite areas where people realize, yes,
we're gonna use these to sell candy, We're gonna sell cigarettes.
These are the obvious uses. But what I really loved
about researching this was seeing the various areas where they
were just throwing it ato everything to see what would stick.

(22:34):
There was a real flash in the pan since too
many of these applications stuff. Some of the stuff generated
attention but then didn't find a place in society. And
yet you still see early versions of vending devices that
we now take for granted, like gasoline pumps, water pumps.
Well maybe not beer spickets, but you also had these

(22:55):
beer spigot feed put money into and then you fill
up your your glass. I don't know, there's some pretty
strange vending machines out there today, and it's it's still
a developing field. Like I'm sure you've read about like
live animal vending machines, like they're live lobster vending machines
and live crab vending machines. I did enjoy when I

(23:16):
was in China several years back. I got to see
a wine vending machine when you put your money and
it was very high tech too, you know, it had
the computer interface, but ultimately you would get an entire
bottle of wine out of it. Oh bottle. It wasn't
like a spigot of a bigot like it was, just
it was distributing full bottles of wine. Now the eighteen
nineties also saw the birth of the slot machine, now

(23:37):
not the gambling engine that would evolve from it and
keep its name, but basic coin operated machines that sold
various odds and end so cigarettes, stationary, etcetera. So early
on there was a link between vending machines and gambling machines,
and sometimes the blurring of that line would help you
get a round gambling restriction. Yeah, I mean, it reminds

(24:01):
me of a whole episode, maybe it was more than
one episode that we did for stuff to bule in
your mind about the slot machine, about gambling and gambling
psychology and gambling devices and an automated gambling. Yeah, and
if there's a I mean, there's a clear history here.
That's that's part of the legacy of vending machines is
the gambling machine. You would not have the gambling machine

(24:22):
without these early vending machines. You know, we often see
new technologies take on a kind of chic appeal, and
I do wonder sometimes if you would have seen that
in early vending machines, Like when a vending machine became
the new way you could buy an item in a place,
like what it would people come to think that an

(24:44):
item bought from a vending machine as opposed to bought
from a human. Uh, selling point would be cooler, would
be better. Yeah, I mean it's the basic novelty attraction,
right like, here's this new technology, this new way of
doing this thing I was going to do anyway. I
think one of the best examples of this, uh is
the is the rise and ultimately the fall of automats.

(25:05):
So I always thinking about that scene in Dark City
with the Yes, there's a wonderful scene with an automat
and Dark City. If you don't know what we're talking about,
and or you haven't seen Dark City, we're talking about
a restaurant in which the walls are lined with all
of these these little doors with little windows, and behind
each window you see a plate or dish, you know,

(25:25):
some sort of food that's prepared, and you put your
coin in and then you open that little door and
then you take the plate. So it's like apple green
jello sandwich. And these were real. This was this was
something from Dark City that you can you can take
to the bank. The first of these opened in Berlin
in and UH, and you know it was it was

(25:45):
true novelty because you'd be. You'd be hard pressed to
find a true automat today, but the basic concept lives
on and probably my one of my favorite restaurant innovations,
uh the conveyor bell sushi restaurant. If you've been to
one of these jobs, No I haven't, I've heard you
talk about it. Oh it's it's marvelous. I highly recommend

(26:06):
everyone go to one. Afterwards, you will feel cheated if
a human brings you your food at a restaurant as
opposed to a conveyor belt that has tiny little plates
with the with like bubble canopies over them. So at
the on the conveyor belt, how do they keep track
of what food you have taken? Oh? Well, they have
a fabulous system. At least the place that that I
frequent because my my child loves it and I love

(26:29):
it too, is that after you're done, you have to
stick the plate into a receptacle and it counts the plates.
So you're charged by the plate, and you're also encourage
there's gamification here as well. You're encouraged to insert more
plates because if you hit I want to say it's
like fifteen plates, you get a little prize. It comes
out lay up ending machines. So it's this wonderful collision

(26:50):
of these different vending machine concepts into one food delivery system. Now,
it's also worth pointing out that even though the automat
went away in many ways, it lives on in just
modern cafeterias. Yeah, and ultimately, I guess it comes down
to the fact that you really didn't have to have
the food behind all those little locked doors. You just
had to have it in a wrapper. You just need
to have it in some steamer trays, put up some

(27:11):
sneeze guards, and have what one two humans around just
to make sure you didn't do anything stupid. You can
never really make sure, though, Robert, You never can. I've
worked in a grocery store. I know what people do
with food items. I guess it comes down to what
do the vast majority of the of of the customers

(27:32):
do with the food items. The vast majority of people
are very nice and very well behaved. It's not everybody
sticking their arm up the cola machine or or trying to,
you know, to to cheat it with little disks of
lead or something, or poking popsicle sticks down in there.
That's when I tried what was wrong with me. Why

(27:52):
was I so into defrauding machine? You just wanted to
It was just your rage against the machine. Joe, just
totally what was going on. It's kind of a little
boy scout in other ways, like I never would have
done that to you were a natural, buttal arian is
where you were. I guess. All right. Well, on that note,
we're gonna take one more break and we come back.
We're gonna talk a little bit about just the legacy

(28:14):
of vending machine technology. I'm John Gonzalez, the host of
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(30:30):
you get your podcast. Alright, we're back. So of course,
vending machines still exist, right, you know, they're all over
the place, and they're now fully adapted to the modern economy,
many accepting credit cards and so forth, and a lot
of them have less cute mechanical tricks behind them. Now
they're just sort of electronic, and you know that's that's fine. Yeah,
I mean I like it when there's an arm, when

(30:51):
there is some sort of robotic component. Um, like there's
a uh. You can still find ice cream machines that
do this where on a little lid and a cooler
will open behind glass and an arm will go down
and and grab one of the uh the the ice
cream pops and bring it out. And I love that
because there's a sense of drama to it. Yes, will
the claw be able to do it? Or will I

(31:13):
be I have or I or will I have to
call this eight hundred number on the side of the
machine and inevitably talk to another automaton. Well that is
one uh that that is one appeal of the machine, right,
that there is an inherent delight in watching how some
machines work. Most vending machines aren't really like this. They're
they're not all that exciting. But these are these other ones.
Things with arms like these are coming back to the

(31:35):
automatons of heroes day and then medieval you know, wonder devices,
the philosophical toys, they were sometimes called. They put on
a show. Yeah, they put on a show, and they
made you think about what was happening. And it wasn't
just a matter of yeah, I want an ice cream
and I'll pay a dollar for it. But in terms
of legacy, I do want to think about how the
vending machine, even the early rudimentary vending machines, did kind

(31:58):
of portend something even more significant, something about the the
automation of the service economy in general. Because you can
of course point to plenty of vending machines that still
existing semen airports all the time, selling headphones and stuff
like that. But in a way, you can also look at,
for example, online commerce as an extension of the principle

(32:20):
of the vending machine across time and space. It's shopping
without the interaction with a human vendor. You make your
selection from an automated display. You pay an automated cashier
and then you receive your item without having to meet anybody. Yeah,
what is say, Amazon dot Com but the biggest vending
machine of all time? Right, you can buy everything from it,

(32:43):
But even in in person purchasing, there is there has
been a push, at least in many cases, to try
to automate aspects of the of the service relationship. Right. Yeah,
I think of grocery stores, gas pumps. I mean basically,
the sort of world that was predicted in an early
vending machine ventures is what we're living in today. We

(33:04):
just managed to keep a few human action interactions around, uh,
you know, for flavor and and or to enforce the
honor system, and to provide flexibility that machines don't have.
The human can be there for when something goes wrong
or when someone has an unusual need or request, and
to service the machines. Of course. However, I have to

(33:24):
say I'm a little amazed that one particular vending machine
designed didn't take off. This one is also mentioned in C.
Gray's book Comes From And It's the back of the
movie theater seat candy machine that is pretty brilliant. Yeah,
like every seat in the theater and then you have
a candy machine right on the back of your seat.
Just imagine how how perfect and perfectly annoying that would be.

(33:48):
I mean, I would hate that because I never buy
candy at the movies. I would I would despise it,
And for that very reason, I'm surprised that it's not
happening right now. I suspect that maybe the reason that
didn't take off is that you want to get people
out of the theater into the lobby so that they
buy more. Oh, there's only so much you can sell
through a back of the seat vending machine, right You could,

(34:09):
by increasing the convenience of selling one popular item actually
decrease overall sales if you just like make it too
easy to get that one popular thing without people having
to be tempted by all these other less popular things.
But on the other hand, some people are not going
to want. I don't want to get up in the
middle of the movie to go stand in line, or
even not stand in line to buy food, but they're

(34:31):
always telling you to. I know, but what if I
could just buy, you know, a glass of wine and
some twizzlers right there in my seat without involving any
human interaction. Which I clearly did not come to the
movie theater for. What if you could just swipe your
credit card and the ceiling would rain popcorn on? Well,
that would work too hot buttered, of course, you know,

(34:52):
Robert picking up from this, I wonder In fact, I
was about to ask you, but I don't have to
ask you because I've been to one with you, these
new school restaurants that have you order through an automated
touchscreen menu rather than talking to your servers. Oh, yes,
we encountered this at an airport day. Yeah, we were
at a restaurant. Every restaurant I've been to, a LaGuardia

(35:13):
in New York works like this. And what I wondered
at that restaurant was do consumers behave in a measurably
different way when they're ordering or buying through a machine
than when they're ordering or buying through a person. And
the data says in many cases, absolutely yes, people do

(35:34):
behave different when they shop through machines versus when they
shop through human gatekeepers. I wanted to call attention to
a interview piece I read by A. Gretchen Gavitt and
the Harvard Business Review with Harvard Business professor Ryan Buell,
who talks about this change in human behavior with with
automated selling versus human selling, and so one very common

(35:56):
trend is in food sales. Think about like the restaurant
that's got the automated ordering pad or online ordering apps.
What what research has found is that people who order
food through machines rather than people, tend to order more
food and more customized food. So for example, there's no

(36:17):
social barrier being a pain in the butt exactly. That's
I think that's exactly. It's so Taco Bell they had
a digital app you could order through, so you didn't
have to talk to a person, you just order in
the app and then pick it up. And what they
found was that orders were more expensive when ordered through
the app than when people talk had to talk to
somebody to order, mostly because people picked more add on

(36:40):
ingredients in the app, so it's like, yeah, I want
to add sour cream, I want to add whatever. Also,
Chili's apparently reported that more people started ordering desserts when
they could order through self service computers that were stationed
at their tables, and movie theaters have reported that self
service kiosks mean people keep ordering more and more stuff. Well,

(37:00):
you know. I think another aspect of this might be
situations where you are relying on memory while you're ordering,
you know, in a kind of at times, at least
for you know, people like me, a high pressure social situation.
You're at the front of the poke bowl line. You're
trying to order your poke bowl and you're having to
and people were looking at you, people were waiting on you,

(37:21):
and you have to also remember all the things you
just said and are saying, and also keeping in mind
what you're about to order for your child or your
or your you know, or somebody else who's you know,
fetching drinks or what have you. There're a lot of
moving pieces, and if you can externalize that process or
part of that process onto a screen, then it's it
is a calmer situation for all involved. That's why we

(37:43):
write are we checked things off on a sushi menu
as opposed to telling the server? Yeah, I think you're
exactly right. There's there's less pressure, there's less of a rush.
But I think it's also very important that there's less
fear of less self consciousness. Because I want to talk
about a couple of other studies. One Wasteen study that

(38:04):
looked at liquor stores, and they found if a liquor
store switches over to self service, the market share of
quote difficult to pronounce items increases more than eight percent.
So people buy more hard to pronounce liquor products if
they don't have to interact with a human when they
buy them. So I won't be self conscious about trying

(38:26):
to order Chartous chartroussa trosch Truce. I think it's Chartruce.
Sounds good to me, but I would be a little hesitant.
I would say that that bottle, that the one with
the horse on it. Robert. Have you ever done the
online pizza app ordering? No? I haven't, but I have
the thing they do. Yeah, so, like I know Domino's

(38:48):
does that. I think they all do. All the big chains,
or maybe not all of them. Most of the big
chains to do that now, and pizza chains that introduce
automated online ordering find that people order higher calorie meals
when they order through the app, and they also order
with way more special instructions. You know, So if you're
somebody who's like, I want the gluten free dough, but

(39:08):
not as a crust. I want it chopped up and
sprinkled as a topping, that people are more likely to
do that on the app than they are talking to
somebody on the phone, because, yeah, you don't feel like
you're inconveniencing anyone, you're ridiculously detailed order exactly. So it
seems like a recurring feature is that people just might
feel less self conscious when they order through a machine

(39:31):
than when they order through a human And uh, the
machine isn't going to judge what you eat, or how
unhealthy what you're ordering is, or how complicated your special
instructions are, or how you pronounce things. The machine doesn't judge,
there's no fear. It just takes the order mechanically. Now,
of course, this isn't without downsides. In this article, Buell

(39:52):
points out that a lot of companies also lose business
from attempting to institute self service kiosks and stuff like that,
because it might make cuss twomers feel like they're getting
less value from the business, they're having to do too
much work where they don't have the flexibility they would
when interacting with a human agent. A lot of it
probably has to do with how easy these things are
to interact with, But I wonder how how much that

(40:14):
whole thing can be extrapolated not just to I mean,
most of this is focused on food, but can be
extrapolated to commerce as a whole. When you go to
a vending machine, when you order something online, when you
order through a little iPad or something at your table
instead of talking to a human or having to look
a human in the eye. When you do any of
this buying purchasing behavior, how does that change how you

(40:38):
spend your money and what choices you make with your life.
And indeed, these are changes that certainly too many individuals like,
we're not we're not even fully of aware aware of
what's happening. While meanwhile, the companies that are rolling this
out are often going to be hyper aware of what's happening.
They're going to you know, it's like McDonald's. They know
you're going to spend a dollar more, and therefore they're

(40:59):
going to do the math then and and figure out
that this is the way of the future, that you
need to be ordering through the machine so you'll spend more.
I absolutely understand this working like at the level I
have personally experienced feeling the freedom to order things, I
would be embarrassed to order out loud with my voice

(41:19):
if I ordered them on an app, like ordering some
kind of complicated request or request for extra stuff. And
yet at the same time, like one thing that comes
to mind is is really the domain of films? You know?
Obviously one can obtain any film you want pretty much,
especially good films, you can get through you know, digital means,

(41:41):
and you can order a copy of it rented, etcetera,
when you go into the right kind of video store.
I guess some people might be embarrassed to ask for
certain titles, but there's also a pride in asking for
certain titles, Like you want you want to be recognized
for being the person that that wants to watch leva
of things. You know, like you want to you do

(42:02):
want kind of a social connection and you want approval
for participating in this transaction. And you're not gonna get
that from the machine. You're not gonna be judged, but
you're also not going to be celebrated. Well, it just
highlights how the social aspects of commerce or a double
edged sword. Sometimes having a person there to react to
you socially and engage with you socially is going to

(42:24):
be a limiting factor in what you would do and
how much you would indulge in all that because you're
afraid of judgment, and other times it will be an
empowering factor, or I don't know if the word is empowering,
if it would be an encouraging factor, encouraging you to
participate in this act of commerce because there's some kind
of positive social benefit to it. And if nothing else,
I just want there to be a conveyor beout, you know,

(42:45):
right at least there needs to be a sense of wonder.
There needs to be uh, some sort of spectacle going on,
even if it's just a small one. You know. One
last thing I was thinking about is I've never tried
to cheat or defraud Amazon or anything like that. But
I wonder if if my feeling from childhood is generalizable
that people, for some reason, while they would never try

(43:07):
to steal from a human or physical brick and mortar store,
would try to reach their arm up into the vending machine.
Does the same thing apply to these more modern worldwide
vending machines like online commerce retailers or just normal stores
that that delegate all of the selling functions to machines

(43:27):
and apps and stuff like that. I wonder to what
extent we attribute Amazon with a little more agency than
we than that we would then we would give say,
you know, Coca Cola machine. Yeah, all right, So there
you have it. Uh. That is the episode of Invention
for this week. We do hope that you will check
out invention pod dot com. That is where you'll find

(43:49):
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find links out to our social media accounts, and if
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(44:09):
about episodes of Inventure. Huge thanks as always to Scott
Benjamin for research assistants on this show, and to our
excellent audio producer Tory Harrison. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
contact at invention pod dot com. On the latest season

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