Perhaps my favorite small channel on YouTube is an indie musician who travels through rural Japan to visit noodle vending machines, accompanied by his own smooth elevator jazz. The vibes are out of this world.
Only Japan can pull it off. In Europe I pretty much never used vending machines as they are so gross and dirty. Even in "clean" countries like Austria or Germany they are like that.
That's a surprise to me. Having lived and travelled across Eastern, Central and Western Europe a lot I never considered vending machines gross. The first vending machine I ever saw must have been a coca cola (or pepsi) vending machine in my primary school 30+ years ago. Then my high school too had a coca cola vending machine and then they were everywhere.
As they became more popular I started seeing them on gas/petrol stations, rail stations and many other places.
However, the kind of machines I talk about always dispense cold cans, sweets, crisps, sometimes packaged yoghurt, but never hot stuff.
Any time I encounter a hot vending machine they are always within some establishment like a gas station where you're supposed to pay first, you get a cup and then you go to the vending machine. The staff of the place is responsible for keeping it clean. However in busy places sometimes there is trash around them (people dropping sugar packets on the floor etc). So perhaps you meant this kind.
Singapore has them too. Never eaten from them so I don’t know what the food quality is like, but they’re never busted or filthy like you’d see in Australia.
You can have a lot of nice things when you have a government (and a society) committed to law and order.
What exactly is gross and dirty about them? I have never thought about them that way (but I don't use them because they generally only have overpriced unhealthy crap).
It's very hit-or-miss in my experience. Some vending machines are immaculate, but the exact same type of machine by the same owner e.g. at another station can have their glass broken, have chewing gum put into it's mechanism for weeks, mystery liquids in the output, etc.
Anecdata, but a vending machine at the local rapid transit station (one of those two-sided hot drinks / soups and snacks combo machines) had its output chute filled with (very visible and smellable, probably human) feces for a week after(!) calling the service number and only then the owner cleaned it. Mhhh. Didn't inspire confidence in their general cleaning routine, for me.
I have no idea how our machines stack up against the ones from Japan or other parts of the world in the vandalism department, though, in practise and outside of city centres. They might face similar problems, I don't know.
Basically never vandalised (and always maintained, filled and working) even in the most isolated and rural places in Japan. I actually wonder about the economics of keeping a vending machine filled in some of the places I've been. How is it possible to have people driving miles to refill them and still make money.
Alternatively, if a company operates for decades, they can make a very, very stable product. Only bugfixes. I'd imagine some of these vending machines are manufactured like that.
Which means, a weekly drive by is enough to inspect, refill, drive on. I used to deliver meats to very rural locations, 10 deliveries over a 300+ km circular route from/back to the packing plant. At 80km/hr, the stops are the big slowdown.
Another way to think of it, is that remote often means little traffic, fewer stop signs, and higher speed limits.
I live 8km from a large city. It's often far faster for me to drive 15km to a corner store in a small nearby town, because I can do 120km/hr the whole way there almost, on my rural road, with no stop signs or lights.
Drive to the city, there are 5 stop lights before the first corner store, that's each way, so chances are high to hit a light. And even one light is 2 or 3 minutes delay.
So rural servicing and deliveries can be quite fast and efficient.
> How is it possible to have people driving miles to refill them and still make money.
I wondered that myself, after seeing some unlucky porter hauling cases of tea up to the vending machines at the top of some mountain temple (maybe Nikko?) on foot.
It was like something out of Death Stranding. It defied physics, looked absurd and would have killed him if he slipped on moss.
Naaaah. Recently I used a great vending machine in Brussels station when heading towards Amsterdam by train, rather than dropping my drink straight down using the curly metal things, it has a little platform that the drink slid into and then it brought it to the slot, avoids it getting shook up.
I think the core issue is that vending machines outside of Japan lack variety...there's not much in them.
That said in Europe (not really the UK though) you can always find little vending machine "nooks" filled with machines containing alcohol, drinks, medicines, condoms etc. I think the negative perception is because of these - they seem to get left dirty and homeless/general public just mess up the spot.
But when you think about it, that's less vending machines and more Japan's culture of cleanliness and lack of public disorder. Outside of Japan, well, people don't really give a crap unless it's their own property...
The US has had vending machines for cold soda and snacks forever. Though, without looking up numbers, there's probably been a general trend towards convenience stores and fast food over time. Certainly the vending machines in Japan are more ubiquitous than I think I've seen anywhere else.
Nothing to do with cleanliness, on the contrary they can be quite gross also. It’s because eating lunch out is relatively expensive, especially for students. Close to 13€ now after last years inflation craze, whereas cooking at home is more like 2€. It’s not uncommon to see even well paid white collar workers bring food boxes regularly.
Bringing lunches to work used to be a much more common meme in the US. (But maybe it still is among blue collar workers.) Does seem to have faded out a lot though.
Total tangent, but why don't homes use these ideas broadly? We have refrigerators, A/C and hot water heaters all in close proximity. Not to mention cool water. Would it really be so hard to get some of the waste heat or cool from those processes into the others?
>We have refrigerators, A/C and hot water heaters all in close proximity.
Maybe yes maybe no. My water heater is in the basement and I don't have AC. It would all have to be very house-specific and customized. And it would tie together what would otherwise be independent systems. A lot of complexity which is usually a bad thing especially at small scale.
One specific childhood memory in the UK is going to a public swimming pool and getting hot chicken soup from a vending machine as if it was a drink just like anything else.
Fun fact! The entire experience was a trial in sustainability, the water for the soup came, filtered, from the pool, and of course the pool contained a lot of soup, filtered, by human kidneys.
Are people aware of automats? They seem very cool nowadays but fell out of favor. Hot food from vending machines was a thing before it wasn’t a thing.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/automat
There's a channel on YouTube that explores some of these, they are so cleverly simple in some respects. Conveyers, servos, more mechanical than digital. But while some machines do all the work, there are also machines that get stocked daily with freshly cooked food that gets kept warm. Just in general, keeping all the machines stocked is likely a massive effort.
If I had to take a jab at the core difference between Japan and other countries, and why this stuff works there; Logistics prowess and manpower. Organised and affordable employees may be another way to word that.
The microwave vending machines are pretty uncommon. Slightly more common, found outside places like school/company cafeterias, is cup noodle vending machines. They simply dispense a cup of dry noodles and then have a hot water tap that you operate manually.
I had a “pizza” out of one of these things in the UK. Very, very bland. Sorta like a really cheap pitta bread with cheese on top.
I was pretty drunk so it didn’t matter, and it was fun to watch it mix flour and water to a dough, top it with sauce, cheese and pepperoni, then cook it in a matter of seconds.
But in the end there’s a reason we don’t usually go from flour-> eating in under 5 minutes!
If you want easy pizza, don't care too much about the taste and don't want to pay for delivery (or it's not available in your area), just buy a few frozen pizza. You can keep them for months in your freezer.
It's not great but still way better than vending machine pizza.
Food safety would probably be a nightmare and sounds totally disgusting. Automats did used to be a thing in some US cities but they pretty much gave way to fast food restaurants/convenience stores as we know them today.
