I spent four hours in a hospital yesterday, with never more than ten-fifteen minute breaks between testing, definitely not enough time to dash across the street to a supermarket or down to the basement for the cafeteria. There was a vending maching two feet from the waiting room, but I had no cash.
STARVING. I was STARVING, and I could look in and see all of the little rows of chips and pretzels and sweet, sweet carbohydrates, and yet I could taste none of them.
So I pit thee, vending machines in the hospital waiting room, for not taking my Visa and for leaving me to growl impotently in futile hunger as I flipped through 1998 copies of National Geographic.
I’m surprised that with the popularity of debit/credit that something like this hasn’t come onto the market yet. Not everywhere; just in situations where people are unlikely to have cash on them and would like a snack. i.e. Hospitals, Universities at 3:30 in the morning.
It would have to be a specialized machine for a specialized location, but there obviously has to be some major negative that I’m just not seeing right now.
A per transaction fee, perhaps? I don’t know why kind of a break large companies get, but for a personal buisness I run, I pay 10 cents plus 2% on every purchase. Most smalls stores pay close to 30 cents per transaction though.
Either way, on a purchase that’s only .50 to 1.00, that’s a fairly large percentage being eaten up by charges.
This was perfect. I want to take this response and hang it on my wall.
Kid_A, it’s at least a somewhat expensive initial investment and the number of debit cards in this country is still relatively small. That is a huge negative in the eyes of business.
Plus, as Bricker said, it isn’t just the machines. You also need the data lines, which means making physical changes to the walls. Hospitals can’t exactly tolerate large amounts of downtime, especially when it isn’t for something that will contribute to the main business. So it’s a large initial investment for the locations as well, and all for a small demographic.
Several years ago a new system using a chargeable chip card was introduced here just to address that problem. It is usually simply an additional feature on the standard ATM/debit card that German banks issue, but specialized cards are available as well.
According to the marketing back then the problem really is the combination of transaction fees and the need for a data connection.
That new card can be used offline. The transaction fees are a relatively low percentage without any minimum. It also doesn’t require a PIN. Unfortunately it didn’t catch on as planned. It is convenient for some things like parking, bus and rail tickets where you know it is accepted, but it’s not so common that you can rely on it and stop carrying cash.
Anybody know how the ticket machines on the London Underground work? Every one of them now takes cards, and I very much doubt they’ve fitted dozens of new data lines for every station. On the other hand, b]Duderdude2** makes a good point, that the minimum fee for the vendor would make it impossible to justify using cards. And in a situation like the OP, it would probably make more sense for the hospital to have an ATM fitted somewhere fairly central.
Auburn University had them as far back as the mid '90s. My student ID card had a magnetic stripe on the back that I could use to make purchases with at the University bookstore, the cafeterias, and the on campus vending machines. The charges would then appear on my bursar’s bill. However, AU was an early adopter of this kind of technology, high speed internet connections were everywhere around campus before most people even knew what they were, and the vending machines would only take the ID cards, not regular credit cards. I’m mildly suprised I’ve only seen the vending technology in a few places since I graduated, but most places aren’t going to have both the IT infrastructure and the food service capability of a major university.
In Japan, newer cell phones can be used to purchase things at some vending machines. I never got a chance to try it out myself (my cell phone wasn’t new enough).
I work with cashless transaction technologies a lot.
They don’t have to run a complete phone line for each ticket kiosk, chances are they aggregate them onto the LU intranet and process them through some kind of agreed interface with the bank. Economies of scale are important here as LU easily has enough leverage to get very good rates out of the banks for CC transactions. In addition, you can save significant sums by removing the need for cash handling and its associated human time cost and insurance cost. This over time will easily pay for both your data runs and transaction fees.
Thus for big companies who can negotiate with the bank it makes sense, smaller companies will have difficulty justifying the cost.
Probably the best solution would be a wireless lan/GPRS/G3 (not my area, forgive the terminological inexactitude). Allowing the companies to move the vending machines around (a big problem with current wired solutions), recieve payment using the widest variety of mechanisms (cash, CC via an aggregator, mobile phone). I predict that the next generation of vending machine interfaces will be of this type (I know at least one will be )
They probably are in the case of the London Underground, but a live link isn’t necessarily required; the CC charging systems in the gift shops on ferries, for example, can’t easily maintain a data link to the bank, so they download a hot list of bad card numbers while they are in port; anything on the list is refused, anything else is permitted (subject to floor limits etc) and cached for processing later.
Of course there’s a slightly elevated risk with this; a newly-stolen card could still be used; someone could spend past their limit etc, but compared to the cost of maintaining a data link to land, or the cost of lost sales from refusing cards, it’s a commercial decision they chose to make.
kellner: *Several years ago a new system using a chargeable chip card was introduced here just to address that problem. It is usually simply an additional feature on the standard ATM/debit card that German banks issue, but specialized cards are available as well. *
Yup, they have those “chip cards” here in the Netherlands as well: I had never seen them till I moved here last fall. AFAICT, they are so convenient (for the vendor) because they don’t require a vending machine to communicate with any network.
That is, the chip is on your regular bank ATM/debit card, and you use the ATM to “transfer” a certain amount of money onto the chip. The vending machine then debits the chip by the amount of your purchase. No need for typing in a PIN or checking how much money you have in your account, etc.; the “virtual cash” is just sitting there on the chip and can be directly transferred into the vending machine.
(Of course, this means that someone who steals your ATM card can spend all the money on your chip even if they can’t access the funds in your actual account because they don’t know your PIN. However, the “chip cap” or maximum amount of money you can store in the chip is fairly low, so in practice you couldn’t lose much.)
Everything is chippable around here; in fact, there are lots of vending machines that don’t even take physical money, only chip. It would definitely be a handy system to have in the US, but you’re right that there’s a “network externalities” factor: it isn’t really useful enough to be popular until it becomes popular enough to be common, if you see what I mean.
They could use a cellular connection. For some locations that might require installing an outdoor antenna, but that’d still be easier than running a phone line.
The obvious question is why didn’t you explain to someone that you were hungry and needed to take ten minutes to go grab some food? They would have simply took the next person in line and called you when you returned.
Unless you weren’t supposed to be eating, then I’d say “I’m sorry you are hungry but you can eat when the testing is complete”.
I have encountered, and used, credit-card vending machines. They were in the Paris Las Vegas hotel, near our room on the 22nd floor. Of course, it was around $2 for a bottle of Dr Pepper, but when you’re dying for a soft drink, you do what you gotta do. Anyway, I have no idea what kind of data connection the machines had.
At the local college campus, all (or almost all) of the vending machines are connected to the Tech Express network. Tech Express lets you put cash on your student ID and use it like a debit card at various places around campus and the bookstore (plus certain eateries and the like near campus). It’s convenient for parents who want to give their kid money for food without worrying about it being spent on crack or something.
The Pepsi machines at the mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota all have credit card devices, and the bottles still cost $1.25. Coke is going to be rolling out machines in the future as well:
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