with supply and demand and all… IM DEMANDING CANNED BREAD!! where’s the supply 🥺?
It replaces workers with robots so it would probably save money too.
People in the US don’t respect others property. Look at any atm machine or vending machine. There’s no way these things wouldn’t be vandalized immediately.
This is the answer. Japan has a lot of respect for others (well, for other japanese at least), so these types of machines will last a lot longer; making the payoff more palatable.
Place a vending machine outside in America, and it’ll be vandalized in a week max.
Even in highly walkable cities, you don’t see vending machines. It has nothing to do with cars, it has to do with the culture of the US being one of disrespect most of the time.
Completely this. Americans don’t like letting other people have nice things. A vending machine would be vandalized, filled with glue as a TikTok prank, attempted to be stolen, and stop working within a few days.
Americans don’t really give a shit about other people. We’re more individualistic. You got yours? Good. Fuck everyone else. If we have to have protests and fundraising efforts to TRY to convince people to help others – we got a long way to go.
Japan is built on respect for your fellow man. You can leave your wallet out somewhere and someone would return it immediately.
Respect for your fellow Japanese man. They have a long way to go in the xenophobia angle.
Americans often don’t respect other Americans, NOR other countries. We also know xenophobia/racism well.
Respect for others property might follow respect for others but that’s not a popular concept in America
It’s a shame too because automats used to be a great way for urban poor to get low cost food. I know a vending machine isn’t the same as an automat but they are similar and would be treated similarly.
Too much reliance on cars for transportation and commerce built around that. Compared to Japan; we don’t have the opportunity for vending machines except when we are contained to a location without the ability to go to a store that isn’t that “far”. We have a larger scale of living; a half hour drive is normal to us, but a half hour drive for other countries is at the tipping point of finding a place to stay for the night and a vending machine selling a common foodstuff makes sense.
If you were forced to walk everywhere and “corner stores” were infrequent, vending machines would be far more common and worthwhile for owners of those machines.
Bro, do you even vend?
Pizza vending machine in Seattle:
Cupcake ATM in Beverly Hills (and 3 other cities I’ve been in including Orlando FL and Las Vegas):
Oh that’s rad! Wonder if the amount of public areas in cities could relate to have more vending machines. The closest city to me doesn’t have a lot of public spaces.
I would imagine the requirement would be high foot traffic. Food has an incredibly short shelf life compared to other vending machine contents. That pizza vending machine likely has to be serviced/refilled/cycled every 2 or 3 days. The cupcake ATM would be slightly longer. Most of the cupcake ATMs are attached to the cupcake bakeries, but allow customers to buy from the ATM outside of business hours or when the line of customer is really long inside.
The pizza vending machine is in a hotel a block away from a larger physical location by for the same company. So similar arrangement. Probably easy for them to maintain
Probably easy for them to maintain
Agreed. I made the maintenance comment as to why pizza vending machines aren’t more widespread.
This is at the Hyatt, ain’t it?
In the USA they lack the population density pressure to make it the most optimal solution of serving food, and the startup costs don’t justify changing from human labor to fully automated food sales. Also I bet the quality isn’t as good as you think it is from some preserved fried food wrapped in plastic.
Japan loves wrapping everything in plastic. They and the US were the only ones not to sign a promise reduce plastic usage. For all the appearances of Japan being eco conscious, they have this one big issue.
Your first sentence hit the nail on the head. Most Americans travel nearly exclusively in their car. Why would they get out of their car to use a vending machine when McDonald’s has a drive-thru? Or if they are willing to get out, why wouldn’t they just pick up fresher food from a restaurant? Moreover, mobile ordering has solved the issue of having to talk to people.
The US does have some vending machines like this, but pretty much exclusively in areas with very high foot traffic, like airports, train stations in major cities, etc.
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Factories I’ve worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.
Exactly.
My thought when opening the post was basically, “Can you imagine the depths that American corporations would sink to in a market where they can totally conceal the flavor, size, quality, etc. of their products until after the sale, and not have anyone from the company present, making them totally immune to any negative feedback?”
Presumably the companies behind these things in Japan are at least delivering a somewhat acceptable food item. I wouldn’t be surprised in any way to find an American version of this thing dispensing literal dead rats.
My experience here. Had one a place I worked which did breakfast foods (yogurt, breakfast sandwiches, breakfast burritos , etc) with a small microwave slot to heat up after it vended. Food was absolutely gross and it was always dicey if anything it vended was still in date. Only nice thing was the front was see through so you could check which items had visible mold and avoid those…
Was cheaper than the cafe and had better hours (all of them) for my shift, but I don’t think the trade off of rolling the dice on food poisoning was worth it lol.
Reminds me of when I had a summer job in a Steel Mill. Two hotdogs for a dollar from a vending machine (AVI). I’d eat that almost every day.
Vending machines work better when there’s more foot traffic and more density.
Vending machines with specialty goods (as pictured) need to be restocked every day and they require even more foot traffic. I think this is the biggest factor why OP’s vending machine is not viable in a lot of places in the US.
I’d argue places like Sheetz serve a similar function in the US
We do have lots of places like Sheetz that serve a similar function, but to be entirely automated is rare.
Automats might be a closer analog.
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I thought you were going to say that their culture is more insular and less sociable, because that would be a better explanation than the popularity of vending machines.
In the Netherlands Food Automats are still very popular
Wow. Those words are so wild that my mind just defaulted to thinking the image was AI generated.
I sure can’t wait to get my hands on a speciaaltje kassouffle.
My boss once said that you can abuse human workers, you can underpay them, you can worsen their conditions (and if you do it slowly) they might not notice, or they going to work even harder to survive. Worst case scenario they quit, and you just find another one “new” and repeat the cycle.
But you can’t underpay robots. You can’t abuse them. Why? Because they just break. You skip on maintenance, on working conditions, on anything around robots - and you are looking on fat sum of money that just going to get burnt on a new robot and its installation.
So no, robots are not going to save money, especially in this scenario, because abuse would be massive.
In France they have this:
We have this:
and this:
I’ve been way for too long ! I only knew of Baguette and pizza vending machines. Things are evolving so fast. Today it’s potato and mushrooms, tomorrow it will be seeds to grow in your own garden !
We used to. They were called Vendo-mats. They had sandwiches and cakes and all kinds of things. They weren’t exactly vending machines in the sense that things would fall down. The food was behind a little door you’d open after paying. I’m too young to remember what the stuff tasted like, but it seemed pretty good because the food would always have to be put in the machines fresh every day.
the food would always have to be put in the machines fresh every day.
ate from these on a few occasions as a kid, and no, they were not fresh every day. I remember my mom sniffing egg salad sandwiches and throwing half the ones they purchased in the trash at a rest stop. also had them at rest stops in the UK in the late 80s as well. it was not great.
LOL. That was an assumption on my part. Eat at your own risk, huh?
definitely culinary roulette - ‘fast food’ ya know?
I’m seeing a lot of advanced retail in US vending machines - inside airports. Food, electronics, cosmetics, all kinds of stuff.
This hints at the problem. Airports have improved security and you have to spend money on a plane ticket to enter so they don’t suffer the same dystopia as public spaces in the US which are trashed and destroyed by any asshole coming through who doesn’t give a shit, including the extremely impoverished and homeless which as a category includes many drugged up people, congenital criminals, and mentally ill. There are some over generalizations here about Americans all having no respect for others and this isn’t fair. Most are wonderful people. But enough Americans suck that it spoils the party for everyone, and broken window syndrome is a thing.
Sidenote: Homelessness_in_Japan is really low because they made some serious efforts to tray and reduce it.
I’ll give that a read. There’s also almost no homelessness in San Francisco Chinatown, despite the rest of the city being an open sore. I’ve never heard the whole story about why but I think it’s a combination of active community development organizations offering low cost housing and cultural differences in how families work, how drugs are regarded, and what is permitted out in the open street.
I recall reading that part of why Japan has more vending machines and more variety is the ownership model. In the US vending machines are typically run by companies that service them and collect the revenue. But in Japan, they’re typically owned by the shops. So shops are more likely to put a variety of products from their store in the vending machines.
I also suspect a higher incidence of social anxiety increases the demand for them in Japan.
We used to have cigarette vending machines here, but nooo, all the people worried about not dying of preventable diseases had to go and ruin the fun.
Love that Bill Hicks quip “i wasnt a heavy snoker. I go through two lighters a day, dude.”
Many countries still have ciggy vending machines.
Somehow related. There is a Japanese anime where the protagonist is a human that reborns as a vending machine.
Been watching it. It’s fucking wacky
Uh where can it go from there
It is quite interesting. I don’t think that there is a better adjective than that. It is called ‘Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon’.
