Why? Every so often, we get new Soda vending machines. Brand New soda machines. They stock the damn thing with fucking 20 oz. bottles of soft drinks. Obviously this is ok because the racks inside the machine support the size of 20 oz. bottles. I’m fine with that. This has been going on for what, 5+ years? But the opening in which I pick up my soft drink, is only the size of a 12 oz can opening. What the F U C K, is going on here? Everytime the damn thing drops a bottle, it gets all crooked and entangled in this little hole the size of my fist, barely. I struggle for 20 seconds to get the damn thing out of there. Why, after all these years are they still making the openings the size of cans? Sure, many places still vend cans. But obviously, the 20 oz bottles are more popular, and are more and more popular every year. So how about we make them openings a little bigger so I can go on with my life and rot my teeth, with pride.
I’ve just realised that man has achieved everything there is to achieve and has nothing left to complain about. It is time for our race to be obliterated and for a new, better group to take over. Our work is done.
A short while back they installed a new Coke machine at the law school here (I saw it when I went to a CLE event held there). It’s pretty neat; the entire front is glass so you can see all the rows of 20 ounce bottles within. You make your selection, and a sort of “robotic arm” glides upward to receive your chosen bottle. The bottle then slides to the right and into an upright, bottle-shaped opening. The whole process is kinda neat to watch. Now, that’s the way to do a bottle-serving machine right.
Heck, the coolest vending machine I’ve ever seen also had a glass front so you could see the levers opening up the freezer and the rubber hose moving on a track, lowering into chambers in the freezer, applying a vaccum to glom onto the frozen treat of your choice, and carrying it to the OUT slot.
Of course, I may be baised since the first time I used this machine, the paper wrappers stuck together and I got two ice-cream bars for the price of one.
They have one of the same machine at the place I work. A slightly differenty Pepsi one, too. I don’t think they’re as hardened as regular old pop machines, so they’ll probably only be in fairly secure places.
The also have neat coffee machines at work that light up and show the make-a-cup-of-coffee process. It’s a pity that it tastes nasty.
I can dimly remember one which must have been from the 1950s. It was like a chest freezer with a lid. The bottles were in tracks (two metal runners which would fit around neck). You’d lean into the machine, move the first bottle down the “street” of its given flavour, turn onto the "main road, and keep sliding it along past the intersections with the other flavours’ streets until it came to a little gate. The gate would let you drag one bottle past it when your coins had been inserted.
Maybe these things were more common in the US, or maybe the older dopers are thinking “ho hum”, but it was a unique vending machine for me. It was in 1986, in a department store staff cafeteria, and the machine was rusty, beat-up and old.