There’s a relatively new soda machine in our break room, and it has one behavior I’ve never seen before. After you buy your drink, it won’t give you your change until after you remove the soda from it. The bottle is moved into a bin behind a closed door, and then the door opens so you can remove the soda. And the change won’t be dispensed until after you take the soda out of the bin. Which means there has to be some kind of sensor to detect when it’s removed.
Any ideas why this should be?
What happens if you just open the door but don’t remove the soda? Is it sensing the door opening or the bottle being removed?
I’ve seen one like that. It has a cool system to take the bottle of soda off the rack and then drop it into the access bay. As you say, the change doesn’t come down until you remove the soda. It looks cool, but overall it’s a lot slower than the old ka-thunk machines. No idea why they wait to drop the change.
No, the door opens automatically and doesn’t close until after you remove the bottle. Come to think of it, that’s a legitimate reason to have whatever sensor it has, but doesn’t explain why it won’t dispense the change.
Perhaps the machine doesn’t know that you have actually received the product until you remove it?
Why does it care? The other machines spit out the change whether or not you take the product.
Speculating here: Perhaps if you don’t remove the product, it clears the bay and returns all of your money instead?
Maybe it waits to confirm that you’ve received the product, and then delivers the appropriate amount of money. If you don’t remove the product, it may determine that it has malfunctioned, close the door, and give you your money back.
I imagine dealing with customers requesting refunds is one of the more annoying aspects of operating a soda machine. Maybe this is a way to lessen that annoyance.
It has no way to empty the bin. And I can’t imagine it would leave a product in the dispensing bin AND give a refund.
I once saw a soda machine give away free drinks. I was in a school, and lighnting hit nearby. The lights flickered for a few seconds, and went I walked past the machine, the little LED display said “0000” instead of a price. I pushed the button for a drink to see what would happen. It just gave me one.
That’s what the door is for - it closes so you can’t get both the refund and the product. Maybe it can’t clear the product, but this video suggests that it will refund the whole amount, and mark the product as being sold out, for at least one model, if it fails to deliver the soda.
The video demonstrates how to use this feature of the machine to get two sodas for the price of one. I don’t link to it to suggest that you should. Don’t do that.
We had these machines for several years before I retired, and I believe this is the reason.
Every so often the fancy dispensing mechanism would fail and the door would open but the space would be empty. Eventually, the door would close again and the machine would refund your money (rather than just giving change).
Which always begged the question of why they needed the fancy delivery mechanism that sometimes failed, instead of something more straightforward that didn’t fail. I never did figure that out.
Maybe to discourage people from buying another product when there is already one in the dispenser, because the design of the machine can’t accommodate product stacking the the delivery chute.