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

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert 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
is how some things are perfectly fine inventions. So some
of them make our lives better, but or they taunt

(00:32):
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 seriously 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 it ultimately

(00:53):
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's 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.

(01:15):
Homer simpson escalway 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
aka the robot cashier. That's right, So time was back

(01:39):
in the 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 have
to be another episode for us. You'd have to leave
goods there, and you know, in exchange some sort of

(02:00):
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,
But then what about a machine that sells goods for you,

(02:23):
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,
you know, honor system situations where you're just trusted to

(02:45):
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,
the honor system is enforced by the sacred nature of

(03:08):
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,
and say you're running a concession stand at the pool

(03:31):
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.
Do you trust the children to leave money on the

(03:53):
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 on our boxes here, one
of the important things to note is that, uh, you

(04:15):
still find plenty of honor boxes out on the street
in the form of newspaper on our 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, unless they're like, there's an article about

(04:36):
them in it, right. But but obviously you could not
do the same with say a you know, a cola
machine or chocolate 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 a machine versus
with a person, Because I think back to my childhood self,

(04:58):
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 stand attendant was away and I could have

(05:20):
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.
There's still individuals involved in this scenario, and you are

(05:41):
defrauding them. Well, it 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. But but let's go back in
time a bit. Let's let's look for the roots of

(06:03):
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 what we can reasonably describe as

(06:25):
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 strange devices. So, uh, this the sixty two

(06:46):
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 water. Uh,
with entries like a drinking horn in which a peculiarly
formed siphon is fixed and uh, water driven from the

(07:09):
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, So it sounds like he
designed one of those early on like peeing fountains right exactly,
you know, which would would would have been technological wonders
then and are still kind of technological wonders today. But
where does the vending machine come in. Well, he describes

(07:31):
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 system like
we discussed for buying candles in a church or something.
Maybe you think, well, 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,

(07:55):
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 the number
of these devices are kind of like that, like the
doors open, uh, 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

(08:15):
would work. You'd insert a five DROPMA 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. 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

(08:37):
very simple design. You've got like a lever, and when
the weight of the coin hits one side of the
lever like a see saw, it lifts the plug up
and it's kind of like a toilet. Actually, it is
very much like a modern toilet, especially when you when
you see the illustration, it basically functions like a coin
operated flush. Uh. And I should also point out that

(08:58):
say Chakrain also discus us as 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 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

(09:18):
like a five drop mccoin, 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 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

(09:42):
the device, but we don't know for sure. It might
have been to Cebious, a reputed inventor of water clocks
from to seventy b c. Who also would have resided
in Alexandria. To cbs is water clocks are worth looking
up by the way, I was looking at some videos
of how these things worked, and there was some ingenious
design because it's difficult to design a consistent water clock

(10:04):
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 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,

(10:28):
you know, a novel design. And this is the case
with a lot of old technological gadgets that you see
described in books. And then on top of this, some
mentions of this vending machine include 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

(10:48):
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 on the honor system.
Him 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

(11:08):
time after after this, uh, this temple device describe a
hero before we actually get any real advancements in vending
machine technology. He does point out 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

(11:31):
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, I guess with 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

(11:53):
actually gives some sort of good in exchange, either you know,
leaks out some sort of valuable lique it or gives
you a candy bar in exchange for a coin. Because
we have all 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

(12:14):
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.
All right, we're back. So according to Segrave quote, nothing
happened in the vending industry until the seventeenth century, UM,

(12:38):
and that's when you had snuff and tobacco boxes pop
up in England around sixteen fifteen. And these were definitely
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,

(13:00):
you fill your pipe and you move on. You don't
fill your pockets, you can just fill your pipe and
then you had you had other instances of early advancements
in the use of vending machine technology. A couple of
centuries later, eighty two, English bookseller Richard Carlisle tried a
vending machine for books in order to avoid arrest for

(13:21):
selling certain blasphemous publications. And uh wait a minute, Okay,
so 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 if the
thing was truly automatic or this was basically another honor

(13:44):
box system, but it is kind of one of these
early examples 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
Ariman from several years back, the random Darknet shopper, which
was this program that people came up with where you

(14:06):
could load it with some some budget, give it some money,
and 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

(14:28):
can you say we did something illegal? Now, more strides
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 Denham applied for
a patent for a quote self acting machine for the
delivery of postage and receipt stamps. But it would be

(14:50):
another thirty years before any real headway was made in
this area. Now, the first U s patent for a
vending machine was a liquid distribution machine that actually sounds
a lot like like euros fabulous temple water distributor what
kind of liquid though? Um, Well, it's interesting when we
start looking at the like the early distribution of liquids

(15:10):
in these machines, Like they're essentially fountains that are going
to uh distribute drinking water such as cold 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 Sagret's book is an amazingly creepy clown head.

(15:32):
This thing is from hell, it is this very round
Oh my god, it's face. It looks kind of like
an on 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,

(15:54):
I will come kill you. Well, it doesn't help that
the coin slot is kind of protruding from one side
of the four as if it's a devil with only
one horn, right, yes, yeah, and 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.

(16:19):
Welcome to your house tonight now. Already at this point
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

(16:41):
whole thing like it it's not like the machine is
reading the coin. It's reading a coin shaped piece of metal.
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 right, you know, because it
comes down to be basically, whatever kind of honor system
works with a proper English pie, tobacco box or the whole,

(17:02):
you know, the holy water for sale in the temple.
A clown head that spits gum at the local train
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

(17:22):
could play an important role in the relationship between the
buyer and the vendor. When the vendor is just like
a rectangular machine that you need to put a coin
in it, would you be more 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,

(17:45):
is that you also saw charitable vending machines pop up
in late nineteenth century France, which, when this seems like
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

(18:06):
you really? You might be surprised. Now, speaking of defrauding machines,
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 a St. Louis account where a man had a

(18:27):
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, 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

(18:48):
man for stealing from an inhuman entity? Yeah, stealing from
a machine? Really stealing? Now, another concern, of course with
all this 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

(19:10):
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, I think one of the more I mean
when 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,

(19:32):
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. 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

(19:55):
versions of vending devices that we now take for granted
gasoline pumps, water pumps, well maybe not beer spigots, but
you also had these 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. Yeah, Like I'm sure

(20:16):
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 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, I 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 no, not

(20:39):
a bigot like. It was just it was distributing full
bottles of wine. U Now. The eighteen nineties also saw
the birth of the slot machine. Now 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, et cetera. So early on there

(21:01):
was a link between vending machines and gambling machines, and
sometimes the blurring of that line would help you get
around gambling restrictions. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of
a whole episode. Maybe it was more than one episode
that we did for stuff to able in your mind
about the slot machine, about gambling and gambling psychology and
gambling devices and an automated gambling. Yeah. And if there's

(21:24):
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 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,

(21:46):
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 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

(22:08):
of this, uh is the is the rise and ultimately
the fall of automats. So I always think 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

(22:30):
with little windows, and behind each window you see a
plate or dish, you know, 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

(22:50):
these opened in Berlin in and uh, and you know
it was it was true novelty because you'd be you'd
be hard pressed to find a true automat today. A
but the basic concept lives on and probably my one
of my favorite restaurant innovations, uh, the conveyor Belt Sushi restaurant.
If you've been to one of these jokes, no I haven't,

(23:12):
I've heard you talk about it. Oh, it's it's marvelous.
I highly recommend 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,

(23:32):
they have a fabulous system. At least. The place that
that I frequent because my my child loves it and
I love 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.

(23:55):
It comes out lay up ending machine. So it's this
wonderful collision 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

(24:16):
locked doors. You just had to have it in a wrapper.
You just need to have it in some steamer trays,
put up some 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 the grocery store. I know what people
do with food items. I guess it comes down to

(24:38):
what do the vast majority of the of of the
customers do with the food items? Right? 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 you know, disks of lead or something, or poking
popsicle sticks down in there. That's when I tried, What

(25:01):
was wrong with me? Why was I so into defrauding machine?
You just wanted to It was just your rage against
the machine, Joe, Fully, 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 going to take one more break
and we come back. We're gonna talk a little bit

(25:22):
about just the legacy of vending machine technology. 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

(25:43):
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 there is some sort of
robotic component, um like there's a uh. You can still
find ice cream machines that do this where a little
lid and a cooler will open hind glass and an
arm will go down and and grab one of the
uh the the ice cream pops and bring it out.

(26:06):
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 be 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

(26:28):
they're not all that exciting. But these are these other ones.
Things with arms like these are coming back to the
automatons of heroes day and then medieval well, 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

(26:49):
in terms of legacy, I do want to think about
how the vending machine, even the early rudimentary vending machines,
did kind of portend something even more significant thing about
the the automation of the service economy in general, because
you can, of course point to plenty of vending machines
that still existing seven airports all the time and selling

(27:10):
headphones and stuff like that. But in a way, you
can also look at, for example, online commerce as an
extension of the principle 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

(27:32):
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, 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

(27:54):
grocery stores, gas pumps. I mean, basically, the sort of
world that was predicted in early vending machine ventures is
what we're living in today. We 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

(28:17):
has an unusual need or request, and to service the machines.
Of course. However, I have to 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

(28:38):
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. I mean,
I would hate that because I never buy candy at
the movies. I would I would despise it Ben 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

(29:00):
theater into the lobby so that they buy more. There's
only so much you can sell through a back of
the seat vending machine, right You could, 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

(29:21):
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 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

(29:43):
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, 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 restaurant that have you
order through an automated touchscreen menu rather than talking to

(30:04):
your servers. Oh, yes, we encountered this at an airport Lardia. Yeah,
we were at a restaurant. Every restaurant I've been to
a LaGuardia 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.

(30:28):
And the data says in many cases, absolutely yes, people
do 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

(30:49):
automated selling versus human selling, and so one very common
trend is in food sales. Think about like the restaurant
that's got the automated ordering path or online ordering apps.
What what research has found is that people who order
food through machines rather than people, tend to order more

(31:10):
food and more customized food. So for example, there's no
social barrier being a pain in the butt exactly. That's
I think that's exactly. It's a 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

(31:32):
the app than when people talk had to talk to
somebody to order, mostly because people picked more add on
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

(31:54):
service kiosks mean people keep ordering more and more stuff. Well,
you know, I think another aspect of this might be
situations where you are relying on memory while you're ordering,
you know, in 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

(32:17):
and people were looking at you, people were waiting on you,
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

(32:38):
is a calmer situation for all involved. That's why we
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

(33:00):
about a couple of other studies. One was study that
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

(33:21):
buy them. So I won't be self conscious about trying
to order Chartous chartroussa tros chartreuse. I think it's Chartrus.
Sounds good to me, but I would be a little hesitant.
I would say that that bottle that the one at
the horse on it, Robert. Have you ever done the
online pizza app ordering? No? I haven't, but I have

(33:43):
the thing they do. Yeah, so, like I know Domino's
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

(34:03):
somebody who's like, I want the gluten free dough, but
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, right, you're ridiculously detailed order exactly. So
it seems like a recurring feature is that people just

(34:25):
might feel less self conscious when they order through a
machine 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,

(34:47):
of course, this isn't without downsides. In this article, Buell
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 customers 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

(35:09):
interact with, But I wonder how how much that 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

(35:30):
human in the eye. When you do any of this
buying purchasing behavior, how does that change how you 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.

(35:52):
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
going to do the math that 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

(36:14):
would be embarrassed to order out loud with my voice
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,

(36:35):
especially good films you can get through you know, digital means,
and you can order a copy of it rented, etcetera.
When you go into the right kind of video store. Think,
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 leviathans,

(36:58):
you know, like you want to you do 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

(37:20):
and engage with you socially is going to 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

(37:41):
want there to be a conveyor belt, you know, 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, like if if my feeling from childhood is generalizable,

(38:03):
that people, for some reason, while they would never try
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

(38:25):
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

(38:47):
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(39:08):
episodes of Invention. Huge thanks as always to Scott Benjamin
for research assistants on this show, and to our excellent
audio producer, Torri 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.