Vending Machinations

Vending machines, the ultimate expression of mankind’s attitude to technology: “I want something that’s bad for me and I want it RIGHT NOW.”  But that isn’t enough for some dispense-ologists, and they’ve upgraded the simple swallower of coins in unexpected ways.

1.  The Human Hamburger Vending Machine

A burger vending machine might sound like an attempt to breed weapons-grade bacteria and test them on stupid people, but this Japanese food dispenser is the size of a building and just as sanitary as a kitchen.  For surprisingly obvious reasons.

Tateishi Burger have worked out how to entirely eliminate human interaction, which seems to be the point of a lot of Japanese inventions, hiding the wimpy “human employee” behind a simple shell of vending machinery.  This “using a person as a moving part” can be viewed as an efficient solution, a vicious satire of modern employment, or the moment we’ll look back on and scream “We should have knownnnnn!” for exactly 1.37 seconds before the ElectroCollars shock us back into mining silicon for the Machine Lords.

2.  Marijuana Machine

Coke and Pepsi are working on wallpapering the entire planet is barely distinguishable red-blue-bullshit - they have to, because they’re selling sugar-loaded corn syrup with about as much independent merit as an Olympic medalist’s sneeze.  Their “taste tests” admit you have to blindfold someone and tell them to concentrate in order to detect any difference.  The above vending machine doesn’t need any of that, and is about as visually interesting as War and Peace in morse code, because it’s selling something people already want.

It’s an LA cannabis machine, selling medical marijuana without the actual “being near a stoner” chore associated with such purchases.  It’s a great idea, it looks like it’s built to withstand an armored car - overkill, since some stoners can have trouble with screw tops - and the only problem is the missed opportunity of not having regular snack vending machines next to it.  One crisp dispenser next to that would make enough to retire on.

3.  Blockbuster

In what seems to be an effort to engineer backwards in time, Blockbuster are building an army of ten thousand DVD-dispensing rental machines, on the grounds that an impassive chunk of metal might be slightly more involved than the average rental store employee.  They’re scheduled to go into operation by the end of 2010 - just in time for every single person on Earth not working for Blockbuster to have signed up for cable TV, pay-per-view, XBox streaming video, Netflix, and good old fashioned bittorrent.

4.  Child Dispensing

An Australian child managed to work its* way into the guts of a toy-dispensing crane game, in an impressively logical - if misguided - attempt to defeat the claw’s inability to grasp anything worth more than fifty pence.  Unfortunately modern society has only programmed children to desperately seek material goods, not freedom or survival, so the child was unable to get back out - requiring a call to an extremely amused fire department.

*We do know the child’s gender, but when something stuffs itself into a shopping center machine for the sake of toys it’s probably best not to get too attached to it.

Rescue workers had to cut the machine open with power tools to extract the kid, under the mistaken impression that someone who feeds themselves to random objects will be useful when they grow up, and then undid all the possible good work by giving the kid one of the toys. Well done, idiot, you’ve just exterminated that kid’s only hope for survival: being trapped inside a plastic box while passersby laugh at you and burly men cut their way in with screaming machines is the ultimate learning experience - that’s a nightmare combined with the plot of a Saw movie - and might just have been enough to smarten the stupid little thing up.  And then you gave him a toy, teaching him “No matter how dumbass you act you’ll get exactly what you want.”

5.  Victim Vending 

We’re proud of doing an insane vending machine article and only two of the entries are from Japan, but those two are the craziest - and both are based on people voluntarily living inside machine shells.  Is this some kind of practice?  What do they know that we don’t, and should we be developing giant can openers?

Behold: The Vending Machine Disguise!

One of these things is not like the others

Yes, this new anti-criminal strategy is “Hold still while wearing an incredibly visible disguise.”  It’s the worst self-defense system since the solar-powered taser, and the fact it’s marketed to single women afraid of assault is insane: if you want to prevent a man from coming up to you, fumbling with his trousers and putting something he finds there into you then perhaps dressing up as a vending machine isn’t the best idea.