We’ve all had it happen to us—we insert a bill into a snack vending machine and it spits it back out. We carefully smooth it out to remove all small folds and make the bill as flat as possible. We try again. The machine spits it right back out again. We persist, and usually are eventually successful in getting the machine to accept the bill on about the twentieth try. Why is this? I am 55 years old, and it has been like this ever since I was tall enough to reach the bill feed slot. In this day and age, why can’t they manufacture a machine that will just accept the bill without giving us any grief? Thank God most of them now accept debit cards. I would have starved on numerous occasions if they didn’t.
they’re computers, they work on optical pattern recognition. if the bill is degraded enough, it can’t recognize enough of the patterns it’s looking for and rejects the bill. They’re not like humans who can learn “Oh, it has ‘1s’ in the corners, and there’s George Washington, so it’s a $1 bill.”
I’d be willing to be that vending machines are MUCH better at rejecting fakes than humans are.
Because if they made the machine too forgiving, it would accept poorly made counterfeit money.
And also, because a machine that handles paper has a lot of moving parts. Remember how often printers and photocopiers used to jam? And those only handled fresh reams of paper, not old bills with dust & grime on them.
Another possible answer: because Americans stubbornly refuse to use $1 coins. (Coin detectors are much simpler and more reliable than bill readers.)
already on a tangent, but the solution to that is for the Treasury to stop printing $1 bills and take the existing ones out of circulation. Blaming the people for being “stubborn” is misguided.
scr4’s first answer is probably the correct one. The readers can be adjusted for sensitivity. Vending machines are set rather tight. Slot machines, OTOH, IME are set rather loosely. I’ve fed bills into a slot that every vending machine in the place had rejected and they were accepted without a problem.
People just don’t think twice about trying to rip off a vending machine, when they would never even think about stealing from a live human.
It’s a bigger risk to the vending machine owner if the machine accepts good photocopies than it is if the machine rejects older worn bills … my understanding is that this is adjustable by the machine owner … so that a machine located on the 84th floor of BankAmerica headquarters could be set with very low tolerance … but the same machine relocated in a high school cafeteria would be set with a much higher tolerance …
I never have issues with bills in vending machines, but I also rarely use vending machines. Machines have to be picky about bills, inconveniencing us honest folks, because a few people inevitably try to scam the bill reader.
There’s usually an orientation, like face-up facing left. There’s a picture on the insert tray that will tell you. You may not be inserting bills right except by chance. The effort to program the reader to accept all four orientations is probably expensive compared to the benefit. I see it occasionally.
They also need to be cleaned pretty regularly. Places like casinos have teams maintaining the machines. Your car wash down the street or soda machine may not be so well cared for. You would be astounded by the kind of crud buildup that cash/coin handling machines build up.
*I used to work in an a large arcade that had 7 bill changers. This was a weekly part of our duties.
There is an amazingly simple solution. Dollar coins.
I think the US dollar bill is the smallest denomination of paper currency in the economically developed world.
Americans choose to live in a country in which i is nearly impossible to buy any item that can be paid for with one coin. Except insulin needles at WalMat, which I think you can buy with a quarter and get change back. (Of course, excluding things that you can get a minuscule quantity of, sold by the pound. Like one dried pinto bean from the bin.)
Dollar coins are only a partial solution … video slots at casinos take $100 bills … laundromats typical take $5 through $20 bills …
Th Mint would save money replacing the dollar bill with the dollar coin … but we’re talking about an agency who mints more pennies than all other circulation coinage combined … so there’s far more wasteful practices than dollar bills …
Depends on what you consider the “economically developed world”, of course. I think we have to include South Korea (#7 world economy), and they issue a 1000 won banknote, which is about $0.85. If you use the UN HDI as a criteria, the upper ranking includes a lot of countries which may have small banknotes - I’m not going to check right now.
ETA:
I’m taking it that you mean “smallest value” rather than the demonination in the country’s actual monetary units.
<derail>
It’s not the very smallest, but it’s close. Out of the OECD countries, here’s the smallest bill available at current exchange rates:
[ul][li]Eurozone countries: 5 EUR ≈ 5.30 USD[/li][li]Australia: 5 AUD ≈ 3.74 USD[/li][li]Canada: 5 CAD ≈ 3.73 USD[/li][li]Chile: 1000 CLP ≈ 1.48 USD[/li][li]Czech Republic: 100 CZK ≈ 3.91 USD[/li][li]Denmark: 50 DKK ≈ 7.13 USD[/li][li]Hungary: 500 HUF ≈ 1.70 USD[/li][li]Iceland: 500 ISK ≈ 4.43 USD[/li][li]Israel: 20 ILS ≈ 5.21 USD[/li][li]Japan: 1000 JPY ≈ 8.92 USD[/li][li]South Korea: 1000 KRW ≈ 0.85 USD[/li][li]Mexico: 20 MXN ≈ 0.969 USD [/li][li]New Zealand: 5 NZD ≈ 3.54 USD[/li][li]Norway: 50 NOK ≈ 5.85 USD[/li][li]Poland: 10 PLN ≈ 2.40 USD[/li][li]Sweden: 20 SEK ≈ 2.17 USD[/li][li]Switzerland: 10 CHF ≈ 9.86 USD[/li][li]Turkey: 5 TRY ≈ 1.46 USD[/li][li]United Kingdom: 5 GBP ≈ 6.21 USD[/li][/ul]
The two that stand out are South Korea, where the 1000-won note is worth substantially less than 1 USD; and Mexico, where the 20-peso note is worth a little less than 1 USD. (Note, though, that the Mexican peso fell in value after the US presidential election; before the election, 20 pesos were worth slightly more than a US dollar.) There are also a few others (Chile, Hungary, and Turkey) where the smallest bill is worth less than 2 US dollars.
</derail>
They can make bill readers that work… it’s just expensive and I’d think the monthly profit on a vending machine probably wouldn’t be worth upgrading or manufacturing it with a $10,000 bill reader (I’m totally guessing at the cost).
One of the big banks here in Canada (and doubtless elsewhere) has replaced all their ATM machines with new good quality machines that you can just insert a big stack of pieces of paper/money into and they’ll scan and recognize the bills, read the amounts on cheques, and tally your whole deposit up within seconds. Then again, this is a big bank and I don’t want to know how much that technology development and distribution cost…
Actually, they usually don’t. Well, not visible optical pattern recognition, anyway.
Real bills fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Real bills are also printed with magnetic ink. The reader will shine ultraviolet light onto the bills and/or measure the resulting changes to a magnetic field as the bill passes by. Real bills will produce a detectable pattern in the reader. Photocopied bills or fake printed bills won’t have the proper UV and/or magnetic signature.
ETA: Same basic result for the OP, though. As the bill wears, the patterns become weaker and harder to properly detect, making the machine think that the bill is a fake.
I suppose the bill-recognition devices are already built and there isn’t much incentive to replace old ones or make changes to newly produced ones. But really, who’s going to counterfeit one dollar bills? I suggest that the gain from looser acceptance of bills would far outweigh the near-zero incidence of counterfeit singles.
Also, I suspect that in Vegas they’d rather take a shitty potentially counterfeit bill and keep you gambling. I don’t know for sure, but I bet (heh, bet) the machines ping central command if they get a dodgy bill, or especially multiple dodgy bills in a short time frame.
Actually, the more I thought about it,m the dollar coin would nor really be any solution at all. A log of laundromats currently have charges of 1.75 or 2.50 per load. Aside from still requiring quarters (assuming prices do not get rounded to the next higher dollar), two typical loads of wash and dry would still be ten bucks or more, and require enough dollar coins that there would have to be a bill changer on the premises anyway, to accept $10 or $20 bills.
When I was growing up in the 40s, the half-dollar coin was in common circulation, with the purchasing power today of about $7 – enough for two gallons of gas, two packs of cigarettes, two chocolate malts, or two Sunday papers. Walking around with a few coins jingling in your pocket, you were considered flush.
It’s been my experience that bill readers in casinos work much better. I detect a profit motive.
In Europe, more and more machines take credit cards. I see them mainly in car parks, but I bought a coffee in a bus depot recently from a machine that only took contactless cards as payment. I suspect that this will be the norm as machines get replaced.
You’re lucky if the bill is rejected.
Getting a bill taken is worse. My friends and I used to tip the machine and shake to try and get it to give us the chips or candy. It works about half the time.
Now I just slink away in frustration.