Keep the Receipt

This afternoon I was feeling a bit peckish, so I wandered down to the main floor of the Business School complex and bought some junk food (without social, esthetic, or nutritional redeeming values) from a vending machine. What made the experience unusual enough to bother putting on the blog is the way the machine made change: it gave me back $1 bills. We’ve been seeing an increased use of $1 coins lately; several of the centralized parking payment machines give the so-called “gold dollars” in change for amounts over $1, and a number of vending machines on campus take them, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that can break a ten without giving you back handfuls of either silver- or gold-colored coins. It’s enough to make you wonder what is coming next…

When we were kids – which, in fairness, is not all that long ago – there would hardly have been any need for such things; candy bars were a dime, sodas were a quarter, and even ice cream was rarely more than that. The loose candy machines that today are usually a quarter (sometimes two) were mostly a penny, and rarely more than a nickel, and I remember them as dispensing more candy per turn of the know – although it must be conceded that my hands were smaller back then, and it may just be that the product looks smaller in contrast. But despite increases in the cost of machine-vended products on the order of 800% higher (or even more), there have been very few changes in the technology, and only in the addition of the aforementioned gold dollars has the available currency changed. It would appear that most manufacturers were counting on credit card and smart card readers instead – and that technology remains problematic…

To have either a credit card or smart card reader controlling a vending machine you also need a secure connection to the network that controls the cards or the Internet (in the case of the credit cards). This isn’t always possible, and even when it is, it’s not always reliable; a simple software glitch can put your machines out of action entirely until someone can get to them and reboot their onboard computers (which are no more reliable than any other Internet-based system). This isn’t a big problem in an environment like a University campus, where people are around 24/7 and you’ll need to restock the machines every day or two anyway, but it’s a real sticking point in most vending operations, which are intended to be self-contained. And even granted that you can use the credit card option to sell much larger and more expensive merchandise, this may not always be a good idea, either…

A case in point would be the specialized vending machines called Zoom Stores, which I first encountered about five years ago in Fox Hills. These are actually less hype than a large storage container with a couple of robotic arms that can fetch product off of various shelves and out of different bins, which is hooked up to a computerized inventory and point-of-sale system. I’ve used them a number of times without incident, to purchase antacids at a conference, or a notebook when I ran out of legal pads. But the only substantial purchase I’ve ever made from one of these locations (an iPod I obtained from the machine at the Detroit airport in 2009) turned into a huge hassle when the product proved to be defective, the machine’s printer wasn’t working (hence, no receipt), and the Zoom Store’s return policy turned out to involve a web address and a UPS Store…

It remains to be seen how this will play out; with the rise of wireless Internet communications and the growing sophistication and reliability of printers (and computerized point-of-sale systems in general), maybe things like the Zoom Store really are the wave of the future. Maybe one day you’ll go to the mall, pick up whatever you want, swipe your card, and walk off with it. Or, perhaps, people will continue to demand that a living person take responsibility for their money, guard their credit information, and pay attention to them as customers. All I know for sure is that whoever has the vending machine concession for the business school got my business today because their machines know how to make change for a ten – and they might again tomorrow…