There’s a Great Debates thread on differently sized currency for the blind.
And another on the dollar coin.
Both claim that vending machines would die if there were changes.
One thing I’ve noticed is that if there is a debate like this on anything in the US, some other countries already know the answer, but nobody thinks to ask them.
Do non-US vending machines accept more than one size bill?
Do they keep up with the many changes in coinage?
I’ve never put a note into a vending machine, but I have put them into change machines. They happily accespt £5, £10 & £20 notes, which are all different sizes, I can’t remember offhand if they take £50 notes too.
Currency has been revamped so many times in the UK over the last thirty years that the vending machine manufacturers just greet changes with a shrug and get on with the business of making it work. Vending machines here typically don’t need to take notes though, because we have £1 and £2 coins.
From my experience with vending machines in Germany (€ since 2002, Deutsche Mark previously)
Different sizes: does not seem to be a problem. You do have to take a bit of care to feed the smaller bills in approximately correct alignment but this does not require much dexterity. A bit more of a hassle IMO is that most vending machines spit bills out if you don’t inset them in the right one of the four possible orientations.
many changes in coinage: there haven’t been many in the last few decades - in pre-Euro times bills have been changed only once every decade or so, and coins still less often. The Euro changeover was dealt with within typically a few weeks, usually the bill reader/coin test module was exchanged entirely. Vending machines don’t seem to have a noticeable problem with the varying national sides of the Euro coins either.
The most prevalent type of vending machine (the ones for cigarettes) are going off cash at the beginning of 2007 anyway (changing to stored-credit chip bankcards, to enforce a legal mandate not to sell to under-16s)
Our bills are all the same size, so I can’t help you there.
When loonies and toonies ($1 and $2 coins) were introduced, vending machines were modified to accept them. The only trouble I ever have with vending machines with regards to “changes in coinage” is when one refuses to take one of the many “special” quarters or dimes that have been minted. Like the US state quarters series, we have a couple of series of quarters with a non-standard design on them. AFAIK, the machines are designed to check weight and size when accepting a coin, and not the design (which is why slugs work, I suppose), but I’ve found that some machines are picky and won’t take, say, my Saskatchewan quarter no matter how many times I put it back into the slot. It’s the same problem with coin-operated pay phones, too.
But to say that the whole concept of the vending machine would die? Doubtful. From reading the other threads, I’ve gathered that some vending machines in the US have been fitted to take dollar coins - once they can accept dollar coins, all you have to do, I’m pretty sure, is keep making coins of the same size and weight to be sure they’ll work. The odd picky machine might spit your Sackie back out a half dozen times like they do with my pretty quarters, but then, it doesn’t like your crinkled dollar bill much, either. Do vending machines in the States sometimes reject the state quarters? If they mostly accept them without problems, then I don’t see why the different dollar coins would freak them out.
Can you tell us who has the authority to revamp currency in the UK? With us it’s the Congress, directly answerable to the Itiots Politic, which is why nothing much has changed here since 1900, except the same metal debasement that has gone on everywhere.
By “revamp” do you mean “issue new designs” as opposed to overhauling the whole currency system? As far as I can find out, new banknote designs are down to the Bank of England, and the other issuing banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland for their own notes.
Coins are issued by the Royal Mint, which reports to HM Treasury, and I believe all new coin designs have to be approved by the Treasury and the Queen herself.
As far as big decisions, e.g. decimalisation, and I presume any future switch to the euro, specialised government committees are set up to take these decisions.
Many vending machines in Germany accept bills. Among those I use frequently are rail ticket vendors and the machines on which we can top up the credits on our university’s electronic payment cards. Typically, these machines accept €5, €10, €20 and €50 bills.
How they get along with it? I guess they’re simply designed to make it work. The slot into which you insert the bill is wide enough to accomodate the largest bill the machine accepts (unsurprisingly, bill sizes increase with increasing denomination). There’s some mechanism inside which can distinguish between the denominations and catches counterfeits.
I don’t know if the machines sort the denominations and store them in separate compartments; I don’t think so, because they will always give change in coins, so there wouldn’t be a need for that. All the incoming bills could be dumped into one big container. Of course there’s no problem for the electronic payment machines, which will not give out change at all but merely top up whatever amount you inserted onto your smart card.
Australian bank notes are all the same height, but slightly different in width. That means that the edge presented to the vending machine is the same for all. (They are all plastic too, not paper).
Most vending machines here take coins, not bills. However, most self-pay parking lots take coins and bills, and will take a variety of bills.
When we swapped over to a new R5 coin recently, there was a short period of a few months where some machines had difficulty with the new coin - they’d be erratic in accepting them. I’m not sure if the problem was hardware or software.
Australian bank notes are made of plastic?
Until recently part of my job had me in daily contact with such cash handling devices.
Basically the design of a vending machine, cark park payment machine or other such item is entirely modular. There is a unit for handling coins, a unit for handling notes and so on. These modules communicate with the controlling software via a defined interface protocol which is usually currency insensitive.
For example the coin handling mechanisms I was used to servicing worked as follows. They took in the coins, worked out what type of coin it was, mapped this to one of 16 values and sent out that 4bit code across the interface. it would be the responsibility of the controlling software to interpret this data.
The logic as to how to map different coins to different output values was part of the firmware of the coin mech itself and could be easily updated using a laptop, vendor suppplied program and serial cable. For example during 2002s euro changover we were able to have values 0-7 represent the old irish coins and 8-15 repesent the new euro coins with the software at the recieving end responsible for giving the appropriate value for the deposited coin (100 for a euro coin vs 127 for a 1 punt coin for example).
Note machines work in basically the same fashion: use internal firmware to convert a bank note insertion into a set of codes on a wire. The ones I mostly worked with were capable of being programmed into something like 50 different currencies and were thus well able to handle a wide variety of note sizes. Given that the company that make this particular product seems to be incorporated in the US I imagine US dollars being one of those currencies.
That said there is varience in the marketplace and the cost and efficiency (first time note acceptance) of note mechs varies widely. I can easily imagine that companies that solely service the US market may have developed lower cost solutions that are predicated on a static bill size.
The major reason this isn’t an issue elsewhere (certainly in Europe, handling the euro changeover was remarkably simple) is that the market for being able to accept a wide range of currency sizes has always been here; far better to create one piece of programmable hardware you can sell in every european country than try and develop hardware for each market seperately.
Yes. In addition, they have a little transparent window, which must make them really hard to forge. Australia was the first, but I think a few other countries have picked up on the technology now.
In Australia it depends a bit on the machine. Those selling lower cost items usually take only coins (including $1 and $2 coins). Others will take notes. The ticket vending machine at my local railway station takes all coins as well as $5, $10 and $20 notes.
A lot of those machines take $50 notes as well (which makes sense when you buy a weekly ticket for a long distance – when I commuted on the Sydney suburban railway system, my commute was about 160 km each way, and the weekly ticket cost about $60.)
In Euro bank notes the denomination is encoded on an embeded magnetic stripe. All the vending machine has to do is to read that magnetic stripe. If the stripe is intact, even badly out of shape notes can be accepted.
Every single note acceptor I’ve seen (this is roughly 7 different types) uses optical scanning to examine the notes (and preumably some sort of fuzzy matching to determine denomination and authenticity).
I even doubt the existance of such a feature and can find no mention of it on the European Central Bank’s website , Do you have some form of cite for this assertion?
I do remember the novelty of the London Underground’s machines which first accepted notes.
Now, the self-service tills at Tesco accept any denomination without a fuss (not that I’ve had a chance to test them with a £50) with none of the ‘this way up’ nonsense. Size of individual notes seems to not be an issue, although I’m not privy to what’s going on inside!
I’ve never seen a vending machine in Queensland that took notes- they’ve all been Coin Only, as far as I’ve seen.
Are you sure on this resp. do you have a cite? I thought the metallic stripe running across the height of the bill on the right was just as a protection against counterfeiting (it features some sophisticated holographic images). I never heard it was a magnetic stripe with data encoded on it (it’s not a stripe but a holographic area on denominations of €100 and higher).
I wouldn’t think it would make sense, either, since people will leave bills wherever they happen to do so without giving it a thought. Leaving a bill close to a loudspeaker ought to ruin the magnetic stripe?