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.
My company has a vending machine for computer accessories. For example, if you need a replacement mouse, just go over to the machine, wave your badge in front of the sensor, select the mouse, and wait for it to drop
CANNED BREAD
Since you mentioned it, I’m obligated to link this clip.
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.
Japan can have more vending machines, because their culture raises people in a way that they have less vandalism and the companies take more responsibility for problems with vending.
I’m in France. There is a gas station near me with three vending machines : drinks, pizzas, and CBD.
The pizza one is mostly fine. The grid protecting the screen was torn apart. Tbf it was annoying. The drinks one is damaged, and is now protected by a metal cage. The CBD machine is completely destroyed.
All publicly available objects in France end up like this.
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.
Factories I’ve worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.
I don’t trust vending machines anymore. I barely used them ever but over the years I got moldy food a couple times and a bunch of times the thing gets stuck and I end up not getting what I paid for. fool me once, shame on, shame on you… fool me, can’t get fooled again
I just realized that in something like 200 years, no one is really going to understand the difference between George Bush and George W Bush. Like, they’ll know they were two different people, but mis-attributing something that one Bush said to the other Bush will be seen as an easy mistake to make (much like how nowadays, John Adams and John Quincy Adams are seen as two different people but are not really that different in the average person’s eyes).
Like, there might be memes of 41 saying “…fool me -can’t get fooled again. Heheh” and no one will realize what’s wrong with the picture.
Japan has a lot of drink vending machines, but relatively few food or candy vending machines. This is actually an area where the United States performs strongly. That being said, Japan has a real number of strange vending machines.
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.
Except robots don’t need to take as many breaks nor do you have to pay them minimum wage.
You do actually have to pay them more than minimum wage, if you think about it.
Minimum wage in many countries is so low it’s not enough to sustain a human. You can’t do it to a robot, since it will just not do its job, no matter how many regulators you capture or how many middle management manipulations you pull. You have to pay a living wage to a robot.
This is why “people are still cheaper than robots”. What happens if there’s a 20% wave of inflation? With workers, it’s “we don’t give out 20% pay raises, grow up”, with robots, it’s “here is your power bill, it’s 30% higher to cover for any further fluctuations in inflation, pay it or shut your factory down”.
Robots need breaks too, if they are not regularly maintained they will start to make mistakes, costly mistakes, and they might break, and when one breaks, you don’t just recruit one more wage slave from the fucked up job market, you shell out a lot of money for a new robot.
There may be cases where the price of labor is lower than the price of a specific machine, but the Industrial Revolution was built on replacing labor with capital.
It isn’t evenly spread out, but it is something increasingly happening to more and more jobs.
Obviously, automation is changing work, and you can make cheaper robots that will be cheaper than working someone to do the same thing. All I’m saying is there is a significant component next to the direct “pay vs. machine maintenance costs” question.
My point is that companies and employers have got used to a ton of leeway with workers, where they can offload a ton of risk to people just because they are employees.
See for example that one case when that US airline wanted to weasel out of honouring a deal offered by their chatbot. That’s them realizing they can no longer just say it’s been a mistake made by an employee, as there is no separate legal entity to push responsibility on.
The same with paying a wage lower than living wage. If they pay sub-living wages, then the onus to make up the rest needed to lead a life that enables you to work long term, thus the risk is on you instead of the employer. If they replace you with a robot, and skimp on its requirements, it will break, and there is nowhere to push the responsibility.
I don’t see how the use or nonuse AI affects the adoption of a vending machine or self checkout.
Take the case of self-checkouts.
Money is missing from the tally at the end of the day.
In one case, you have an employee as cashier. You can reprimand them, in some jurisdictions even take it from their pay.
What do you do with a machine if money is missing? It may be a tricky customer/thief, it may be just that the machine is not always 100% accurate in certain circumstances, maybe you skimped out on maintenance one too many times. Who do you blame?
That’s why there are no vending machines for certain types of goods, or no self-checkouts at car dealerships or “bad neighbourhoods”. Sometimes the risk component is too high.
What do you do with a machine if money is missing? It may be a tricky customer/thief, it may be just that the machine is not always 100% accurate in certain circumstances, maybe you skimped out on maintenance one too many times. Who do you blame?
Having dealt with automation in a specific context, the people making these decisions aren’t focusing on blame. Instead, there is an assumed increase in shrinkage which gets factored into the cost-benefit analysis on whether to choose automation. The conditions in which shrinkage can happen affects the risk shrinkage.
No one is looking at who to blame if an electronics store goes for self checkout, they are looking to see at how much easier it will be for people to steal from that store compared to if all cashiers are human.
The problem is minimum wage is the break even equivalent of like 2-10k human hours without even factoring in expensive maintenance costs.
A return on investment of 0.5 to 2.5 years is pretty good for companies. You also have to factor the costs of maintaining a space for a human equivalent. Paying a wage doesn’t cover all labor costs.
I mean, maintenance is going to be a bitch. Your going to have to pay thousands in travel fees and probably thousands of dollars an hour labor, plus whatever robit parts cost everytime it breaks down. And while it’s broken down, you can’t earn revenue, like you could just replacing an employee.
You have to pay them minimum wage, It’s just called “monthly maintenance expenses” and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
Is it? I can buy a vending machine for less than $8000. Converting that cost to minimum wage, that is ~28 full time weeks worth of labor to act as a mechanism to sell items. There are probably a lot of times when the cost in capital is less than the cost in labor.
Popcorn seems like the simplest to me. Saw one in a subway in Buenos Aires once. Its so cheap and once it pops, the smell sells itself
Needs to be cleaned every day.
By human or machine?
Having worked at a movie theater, I can tell you that the answer is “by a human”
If you can make a machine that cleans a popcorn popper well enough to pass a health inspection, you’ll be a very rich person. Especially a small vending-machine-sized popper-and-dispenser all-in-one jobby.
I don’t understand the question.
You have a vending machine in a train station cooking greasy popcorn all day. Is there a machine that can clean that ?
Baked on greasy-buttery-ness is very difficult to clean.
Pretty sure a machine that can be built to make popcorn can also.be engineered to self clean. Human maintenance one per week to swap out parts and re-top corn.
I’m sure it’s possible but I suspect it’s simply not cost effective.
Removing grease requires hot water, harsh solvents, and scrubbing. If you’ve ever cleaned an oven or bbq or whatever I’m sure you’d agree that it would be very difficult to automate.
Something like this
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.
Where I am in Canada we have personal pizza machines, coin-op skate sharpening and once I saw a french fries/onion rings one. Coffee vending machines used to be a thing but I think K Cups kind of took that over
Coin op skate sharpening sounds perfect for Canada.
I wonder if I could bring that to Finland…?
I will say while I deeply agree that we don’t have a cool vendung machine American identity…
My mall has vending machines for cotton candy that will make shapes, a vending machine for hijabs and other covers, a vending machine for medication and beauty products, a vending machine for umbrellas and a vending machine for weed.
I’d rather just have curry and hot chocolate but hey… Its something.
We have cool ones here, too!
I spy digipet
It’s part of a balanced breakfast on the go!
I saw an orange juice machine but it had a stupid fancy touchscreen and was out of order.
I feel like there’s potential in this if you avoid the temptation to go with a complicated touchscreen and instead just keep everything as mechanical as possible
