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.
Costs
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.
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
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.
In the Netherlands Food Automats are still very popular
In France they have this:
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.
Americans would just crush themselves to death on them
cuz nobody likes eating out of plastic containers in the United States. these vending machines are full of extremely processed garbage taste like shit and produces a shitload of plastic garbage, waste garbage crap. I like Japan.
Have you ever seen the frozen food section of a grocery store?
I can't tell if this is satirical.
Is this cool because it has Japan signs? Has it any more features than US machines? Or US has no vending machines at all?
There are vending machines but they generally don't serve hot food or nearly the same amount of variety as Japanese machines do. Usually only soft drinks and shelf-stable snacks like candy bars, chips, cookies or crackers.
The US could have more hot drink vending machines, but I think the sort of clientele that wants a hot coffee wants it to be highly customized like the shit you get at Star Bucks. Highly customized, burnt coffee.
I think you underestimate how many Americans just want a cup of Joe with cream and sugar. A whole lot of us are out there drinking gas station/convenience store coffee or brewing a cup or pot every day of store brand pre-ground.
And the ongoing joke about people getting frustrated with just wanting a "large coffee" and being confused by starbucks calling it a "venti" and spouting off about how they don't want any fru-fru mocha-chino late bullshit even though no one asked.
I think the bigger issue is that of how Americans get around and how available real estate is.
Japan has a lot more people who can/will walk, take the train, etc. that's a lot more opportunities for them to walk by a vending machine.
Americans tend to get around in our cars, so if you want to sell them a coffee, snacks, hot meal, etc. they need to be able to park somewhere.
And vending machine food isn't exactly a huge draw, people probably aren't going to go to your parking lot with a row of vending machines just to grab something to eat, so you kind of need something else to draw them in, some bathrooms, gas pumps, or at least convenient parking to other stuff they need to get to, so you might as well stick a gas station there, and since you're going to need a cashier you might as well move that vending inside and you can get more and more variety of merchandise on shelves that you can cram into some vending machines so it might as well just be a convenience store.
This looks like it's serving hot food. US vending machines only have cold or room temp packaged stuff. They're very basic. The range of machines in Japan is seemingly endless, and many of them are far more complex machine wise than what we typically have here.
This is not exactly accurate. There are vending machines in the states which produce full cooked products. I've mostly only seen them in Airports ,and they generally cost more than a comparable meal at an actual airport restaurant .
And to be fair, didn't we invent the Automat? Basically a giant vending machine general store in, like, the 50's? I'd love to see one of those. They sounded rad.
Those automats had a fully staffed kitchen behind them, cooking and placing the food in slots to be bought
Yeah. There are vending machines that will cook you a pizza. It just turns out there isn't that high a demand for vending machine pizza.
This vending machine is serving good that comes out already heated/ at the very least warmed. It's not just bags of chips
Factories I've worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Vending machines in the USA are common, but they are typically attached to an existing business. For instance, a Walmart or gas station will commonly host several machines in its entrance area.
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.
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.
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