I stopped and thought about it and one of the very few reasons why I even have cash is to pay for things in the various vending machines we have at work (Gotta satisfy my junk food cravings dontcha know). If the machines took debit/credit, I’m not sure I’d need cash at all and I know plenty of people don’t need cash because they’re better at resisting the temptation offered by those cruel temptresses (vending machines, ya pervs).
So, do such machines exist? If not, why not? If so, where?
EDIT: And if not, what’s stopping them from being being implemented? I know the machines located on the outside of buildings would have a hard time getting the phone connection that the in-store swiping dealies require, but what about the vending machines located inside office-type buildings? Surely they could order up a phone jack to plug them into, or something.
Absolutely. There are several at the two universities I’ve attended (standard snack/drink machines) and of course many at airports. They even have iPod vending machines at airports nowadays, and those definitely take CCs. Where have you been?
The machines at my office do but don’t work half the time (connection problems). Also, they initially debit your account $5 then put the amount less your purchase back withing a couple of days.
I’ve seen drink and snack vending machines at malls around here that took plastic since at least 2003. Our university had them in the student union since at least 1994.
However, these are the exceptions and not the rule. Most vending machines I see are the dollar and coin type.
I’ve only seen two, one was at an amusement park (because who cares about interchange fees when you’re charging $5.00 for a bottled soda), and the second was (where else?) inside Visa’s headquarters.
I saw one recently, I’m trying to remember where. Vending machines with card readers aren’t common in Canada, perhaps because we have commonly-used high-value coins. Even ones with banknote readers aren’t common.
I see credit card readers on higher-value vending machines; soda machines that dispense bottles, rather than cans, or snack machines that vend meal items, not just snacks and gum. All of them around here seem to have the tap-and-pay mechanism for RFID-equipped cards. Maybe 20% of the machines at my university have them (with no real rhyme nor reason for placement), and they’ve started appearing at Wal-Marts and such, too.
So do the ones in Toronto. A while back there was a bit of a scandal because the machines were accepting charges without validating the card, and the parking authority decided that they could eat the losses due to the small number of cards that were affected. Of course, once the word got around, everybody started to do it, and the machines had to be updated pretty quick.
I remember where I saw the machine: at the Invista Centre, a four-pad hockey arena in Kingston, Ontario. It was the kind that sold sports drinks and energy drinks at $3 a pop.
Oh yeah, I’ve seen vending machines that sell really expensive things, like iPods and portable DVD players, in airports and Macy’s. They take credit cards of course. Who would want to pay for an iPod in nickels?
Not only have I seen vending machines that take EFTPOS/Credit cards, I saw some a few years ago that you could send a text message from your mobile phone (provided you were with a specific carrier) and the purchase price would be added to your phone bill and the machine would dispense your product.
Haven’t seen any of those around for a while, though, so I’m guessing they were largely experimental and that it didn’t work out.
Every vending machine around my university campus takes debit cards, but only because they were originally modified to accept “Dining Dollars”, a program which puts money on your student id specifically for food.
I could see them being in airports, but in Macy’s? I suppose it’s a way to sell merchandise while safeguarding against in-store theft, but that seems a bit odd.
I saw such an iPod vending machine at a Macy’s in San Francisco a few years ago and though “Interesting idea”. Look at it his way: iStuff is pretty self-explanatory. If you want an iPod, you know which one you want, they cost the same everywhere (more or less), and if you want to know anything specific about it, you’ll look it up on the internet. So, instead of paying a salesguy to hang around on the offchance someone wants an iPod or whatever, they can put it in a vending machine and find something more constructive for the salesguy to do. Or maybe not have him there at all, which is less good.