Geekfoolery

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, the family took a vacation for a couple weeks at a beach cottage a couple blocks from the ocean. In those simpler, carefree days, parents such as my Mom would not worry (too much) about telling a five-year-old to walk down the street to the corner store to buy breakfast cereal or bread or eggs or whatever else was needed that day. This particular store had a vending machine out front that sold quarts of milk, and that was one item that was on my short shopping list almost every day. It cost 50 cents or 75 cents, and I would take the quarters Mom had given me and buy the milk, which would be dispensed with a thunk into the slot. On the second or third day that I was buying the milk, for some reason that I can’t remember, I found myself on the ground looking under the machine, where I saw … wonder of wonders… three quarters! I had the habit of spotting change dropped on the ground from an early age, and dimes and nickels were nice, and even one quarter was a bonus. But three, that was a paycheck! I got the groceries home and told Mom about my good fortune.

What was interesting… even amazing… was that the next day, I looked under the machine again, and there were THREE MORE QUARTERS. The next day, there was fifty cents, and the next day, seventy-five cents again. Clearly there was some malfunction in the machine’s coin slot or receiver mechanism that was dropping a couple coins over the course of the day. And for me, it was like having a goose that laid a golden egg. Seventy-five cents a day was a comic book and an ice cream cone, with change left over. My mom told me later that my older brothers, upon learning of my bounty, had planned to wake up before me and raid the milk machine before I did, but she put a stop to it… it was my meal ticket.

I’ve never seen another milk vending machine again, nor have I found a machine that had free money waiting for me on any kind of regular or predictable basis. But this shortcoming notwithstanding, I have seen some interesting vending machines over the years.

I visited Japan in the late 80s and vending machines were everywhere, and sold pretty much everything as far as I could tell. My favorite one was the machine that sold cold beer and cans of self-heating sake. Japan still seems to be the market leader in vending machine innovation. You can get everything from rice to fresh eggs to disposable cameras, and for a while there were machines that sold used schoolgirl’s panties. Here’s a modern Japanese vending machine that seems to defeat the purpose of having an automatic machine by having an actual person inside the machine who gives you your stuff.

Here at home, it may not occur to most people that vending machines are becoming more and more prevelant. Mostly we think of the coke-and-candy machines in the break room at work as the little-changed presence of the vending machine in daily life. But to me, we have things like subway ticket machines, DVD rental, airline check-in, supermarket check-out, and what is the ubiquitious ATM if not a bank-in-a-vending machine?

But there is one product sold in vending machines that I have seen lately, mostly in the airport, that I can’t really figure out. It’s the machine that sells Apple iPods through a vending machine. I love the iPod, and I can understand why airports stores and hey, why not vending machines, sell accessories. You’re traveling, you’ve lost your headphones, sure, you’ll pay the airport premium to get a new pair. But an iPod? You can’t even use it until it’s charged up and loaded with songs… are bored people sitting in airports saying, “Hey, I’ve got $300 in quarters, what can I get? Snickers, little chocolate donuts…. hmmm, iPod. OK.” To be fair, these machines take credit cards, not quarters, but I want to know: Who is buying these things?

And how much money can I find if I look under the machine in the morning?

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