The Vending Machine

that game? I suppose it was a game, but I took it very seriously where you really thought you could reach up through the bottom of the vending machine and get that food item from the bottom row. I do not remember trying too hard at it, because it ultimately seemed like there were there were too many risks, both both physical and social, because either you are going to

get your arm caught in there or jammed or pinched. Uh, There're just's gonna be some sort of trap or fail safe, or you're just gonna be seen doing it and you're gonna get in trouble for trying to steal from a candy machine. It always seemed like a kind of humiliating. Homer simpson escalway to die would be you die accidentally pulling the vending machine over on top of you while you're trying to reach up and grab some andy cap

hot fries from the bottom row. Exactly. And you know, these are two key points though, that we're gonna we're gonna come back to again and again in this episode. In this episode, we are talking about the vending machine aka the robot cashier. That's right, So time was back in the olden days when you had to either buy goods directly from a human salesperson that sounds horrible, or you simply had to leave payment after you took off

with it. And as as far as that payment goes prior to the invention of money, which would be have to be another episode for us. You'd have to leave goods there, and you know, in exchange some sort of a barter system. Well, that sounds difficult if you can't work out what the exchange rate for what you're bringing is. Sor right. In either case though there's a human interaction or there's some there's some human judgment on what is fair, or there's just some sort of an honor system in place,

or or a human there just to prevent you from stealing. Right, But then what about a machine that sells goods for you, something that has become so ubiquitous Now it's fascinated to think back on on where the shift occurs we get into this vending machine territory. Just where does such a

machine come from? At what point do we cross over from machines that are ultimately a little more than honor boxes, you know, honor system situations where you're just trusted to leave your money and take exactly what you paid for. And then where do we get into true mechanical sellers. Right.

The honor box system is what you would often find in say a church where they'll be selling prayer candles or something like that, and there's a little offering box and it's like, you know, please put a dollar in and don't just take all the candles, and and and Yeah, the honor system is enforced by the sacred nature of the space and your obligations there. There's a supernatural security

guard in that case. Yeah, you don't have to worry about you know, somebody trying to reach their hand in there. Just make off with all the candles for the most part. But you really do have to worry about that if say you want to sell minor food items snack items, and say you're running a concession stand at the pool side or something like that, and you need to run

off to put some money in the parking meter. I don't know whatever whatever the people maaming those concessions stands had to do when they put up the sign that said be right back. So, so kids are coming, they want to buy an ice cream bar or a Snickers or something like that, and the goods are just right there. Do you trust the children to leave money on the counter as they should and take things and take only

what they've actually paid for. Wouldn't it be better if you had a machine that enforced the exchange of currency for for payout of items and didn't allow kids to sneak an extra hot fries here and there. Now, of course, that as we're talking about on our boxes here, one of the important things to note is that, uh, you still find plenty of honor boxes out on the street in the form of newspaper on our boxes, oh, the newspaper vending machines you put your money in and if

you wanted yes, you could take all the newspapers. That would be cumbersome. How often does somebody want more than one newspaper though, unless they're like, there's an article about them in it, right. But but obviously you could not do the same with say a you know, a cola

machine or chocolate machine. Now, I wonder something that we can maybe come back to in a bit, because I wonder how the psychology of transaction and the psychology of consumer behavior changes when you're dealing with a machine versus with a person, Because I think back to my childhood self, who you know, I would reach my arm up in the machine and see if I could grab whatever, a brisk tea out of the drink machine, or grab something

out of the snack machine. I don't think I was ever able to do anything like that, but I would try, and I would never do that at even even if the concession stand attendant was away and I could have just reached out and stolen whatever I wanted. I would never have done that at a real concession stand that was not controlled by machine operated mechanisms. It's a different scenario entirely. And then at the same time, it's it's ultimately not it's still somebody's property that is for sale.

There's still individuals involved in this scenario, and you are defrauding them. Well, it felt completely legitimate to try to reach into the machine and steal from it in a way that it wouldn't from a place that had a human even if they weren't there right now, right, because you would have been exploiting a design flaw. Right, Yeah, I guess so that maybe that makes it okay, it doesn't to be clear. But but let's go back in time a bit. Let's let's look for the roots of

the vending machine. So I was reading through an excellent book on the social history the vending machine titled Vending Machines on American Social History by Carrie C. Grave and uh it points out that the you know, the first American vending machines popped up in the eighteen eighties, but the earliest mention of what we can reasonably describe as a vending machine is attributed to the Greek inventor Hero

or Heron, the Alexandrian engineer of the first century. See Okay, now, Hero has tons of inventions attributed to him, right, And then the book that the stems from is loaded with descriptions of strange devices. So, uh, this the sixty two c E book Newmatica has descriptions and illustrations of various curios, fountains, temple gadgets, you know, doors that open due to the

you know, some sort of movement of steam or fire water. Uh, with entries like a drinking horn in which a peculiarly formed siphon is fixed and uh, water driven from the mouth of a wine skin in the hands of a satyr by means of compressed air. So a lot of curios and marvels toys essentially, So it sounds like he designed one of those early on like peeing fountains right exactly, you know, which would would would have been technological wonders

then and are still kind of technological wonders today. But where does the vending machine come in. Well, he describes and illustrates a coin operated device for for selling sacred water in Egyptian temples. Okay, so the idea is it's maybe you don't believe in the honor box system like we discussed for buying candles in a church or something. Maybe you think, well, people are just going to be stealing sacred water if we don't make them pay for it,

so you need a machine to enforce that transaction. Well, I don't know how much of it was because I think there is still an honor so I mean, it's a temple, right, but maybe there's a sense of let's make it a little wondrous, you know, because the number of these devices are kind of like that, like the doors open, uh, you know, as if by sacred magic. But of course it's supposedly caused by you know, some sort of heat apparatus. But but here's how this device

would work. You'd insert a five DROPMA coin and the coin would tip a balance inside which would lift a plug and allow a small amount of water to escape and then pour into your chalice or cup or what have you. And then once the coin makes its way into the collection chamber, the balancer turns and the plug goes back into place. Okay, so it sounds like a very simple design. You've got like a lever, and when the weight of the coin hits one side of the lever like a see saw, it lifts the plug up

and it's kind of like a toilet. Actually, it is very much like a modern toilet, especially when you when you see the illustration, it basically functions like a coin operated flush. Uh. And I should also point out that say Chakrain also discus us as this in his American Scientist article water Fountains with Special Effects from two thousand five. But it's still certainly benefited from an honor system of sorts.

So you know, the gods are watching, so you're not going to try and cheat the machine with, you know, some sort of a coin on a string or some some smooth stones that are just happened to be shaped like a five drop mccoin, right, because this was not a refined system of judging what had been put into the slot. It was basically anything that could push the lever down. Right. Now, in terms of like who actually invented this and whether it was actually Bill, this is

a little more difficult to to really figure out. It's certainly possible that Hero himself was indeed the inventor of the device, but we don't know for sure. It might have been to Cebious, a reputed inventor of water clocks from to seventy b c. Who also would have resided

in Alexandria. To cbs is water clocks are worth looking up by the way, I was looking at some videos of how these things worked, and there was some ingenious design because it's difficult to design a consistent water clock that just keeps working the same over time because you

know your your reservoir tank strained down. So he created that these really smart designs with like extra reservoir tanks that would pour into your main reservoir tank and then a siphon to manage how high the water level was is really clever. Now, we also don't know if what Hero describes here was ever actually built or if it's just, you know, a novel design. And this is the case with a lot of old technological gadgets that you see

described in books. And then on top of this, some mentions of this vending machine include embellishments that are difficult to nail down or simply don't fit the timeline. But it does give us an idea of of what some of the earliest, if not the an actual vending machine consisted of, then at least the earliest ideas of what a vending machine could be. Right, the general principle of automating a transaction without just relying on the honor system.

Him on the buyer's part, right, and it's it's kind of a gradual evolution to get to that point. Uh. However, as a Seagraft points out, it's gonna be a long time after after this, uh, this temple device describe a hero before we actually get any real advancements in vending machine technology. He does point out there there's some For instance, there's an uncredited nineteen sixty New York Times article that claims, among other things, that there was a coin operated pencil

selling machine in ten seventies six China. You know, I was really holding out for that medieval European vending machine that you put in a coin and dispenses a piece

of the true cross. Well, I mean there were certainly automatons throughout European history, I guess with the vending machine, especially the early days of the vending machine, you're looking very for a very particular type of automaton that does something, or rather not just does something, uh you know, but actually gives some sort of good in exchange, either you know, leaks out some sort of valuable lique it or gives

you a candy bar in exchange for a coin. Because we have all matter of amazing automatons of showing up in European history and everything from pooping ducks to praying monks. But to what extent you have things that are actually facilitating an exchange of money for goods. All right, we'll take a quick break and then when we come back we will discuss more of the history of the vending machine.

All right, we're back. So according to Segrave quote, nothing happened in the vending industry until the seventeenth century, UM, and that's when you had snuff and tobacco boxes pop up in England around sixteen fifteen. And these were definitely on our system devices, not unlike newspaper boxes and they've been They were just filled with various tobacco products instead.

So it would be kind of like you pay for access to them, but you could take as much as you wanted, right, Yeah, like you you you pay your money, you fill your pipe and you move on. You don't fill your pockets, you can just fill your pipe and then you had you had other instances of early advancements in the use of vending machine technology. A couple of centuries later, eighty two, English bookseller Richard Carlisle tried a vending machine for books in order to avoid arrest for

selling certain blasphemous publications. And uh wait a minute, Okay, so he's saying like, I didn't sell it, Yeah, a machine sold it. Nice. However, he was still held responsible and one of his employees was convicted for selling blasphemous literature via the machine. Uh. Now, it's unknown if the thing was truly automatic or this was basically another honor box system, but it is kind of one of these early examples of who is to blame when a machine

sells something that is illicit. This is something that has fascinated me for a while. I can think of examples, not necessarily with selling, but uh, I think about the Ariman from several years back, the random Darknet shopper, which was this program that people came up with where you could load it with some some budget, give it some money, and then say go a little thing, just go out onto the dark web and buy randomly. So you know, then they got in trouble because obviously it bought drugs,

bought whatever kinds of illicit materials. But then they could say, well, we didn't tell it to buy drugs. We just gave it money and released it into the wild, So how can you say we did something illegal? Now, more strides were made in the tobacco honor box arena. But the next area of exploration and patent in England happened to be stamps. Eighteen fifty seven, Simi and Denham applied for a patent for a quote self acting machine for the

delivery of postage and receipt stamps. But it would be another thirty years before any real headway was made in this area. Now, the first U s patent for a vending machine was a liquid distribution machine that actually sounds a lot like like euros fabulous temple water distributor what

kind of liquid though? Um, Well, it's interesting when we start looking at the like the early distribution of liquids in these machines, Like they're essentially fountains that are going to uh distribute drinking water such as cold drinking water, or later it's going to be things like beer. That makes sense. Now, by the early twentieth century, gum and candy machines began taking off. Now, one of the machines featured in Sagret's book is an amazingly creepy clown head.

This thing is from hell, it is this very round Oh my god, it's face. It looks kind of like an on e the Japanese only that kind of demon, but much worse, uh, much more kind of It's got these creepy, sleepy eyes that are like, when I wake up, I will come kill you. Well, it doesn't help that the coin slot is kind of protruding from one side of the four as if it's a devil with only one horn, right, yes, yeah, and asymmetric devil. And it's got this white ring around its mouth. Is just an

absolute terror. Yeah, and then you pull the gum from its teeth of course, uh, like I was chewing that um. Welcome to your house tonight now. Already at this point there were designer concerns with the use of slugs and hairpins to cheat the machines. So the idea of a slug is what we mentioned earlier. It's like a weighted device that you put on a string or something and put it into the machine and activate the coin detection

without actually paying. Yeah, I mean you get into this whole thing like it it's not like the machine is reading the coin. It's reading a coin shaped piece of metal. So if you have a coin shaped piece of metal that has no intrinsic value, then whammo, you got yourself a piece of gum, right right, you know, because it comes down to be basically, whatever kind of honor system works with a proper English pie, tobacco box or the whole, you know, the holy water for sale in the temple.

A clown head that spits gum at the local train station is not going to benefit from the same holy reverence. You know, though, I do wonder if they're onto something here with the clown head, because this is personified, it's looking right at you, it's anthropomorphic, and I think that could play an important role in the relationship between the

buyer and the vendor. When the vendor is just like a rectangular machine that you need to put a coin in it, would you be more less likely to try to defraud that machine then you would a machine that looks like a creepy, demonic entity that could follow you home. It's true, you know. You had another twist on this, though, is that you also saw charitable vending machines pop up in late nineteenth century France, which, when this seems like a decent way to invoke the honor system for machines

that can't really defend themselves. You know, it's like, yes, you're buying gum or what have you from a crappy machine that you could probably defraud, but the money is going to charity. So how much of a monster are you really? You might be surprised. Now, speaking of defrauding machines, the earliest record of a vandalized machine, according to Segrave, comes from seven in England, three young men were convicted

for using brass discs to buy cigarettes. And then there's also a St. Louis account where a man had a coin on a string and he was using it to score cigars out of a machine and it was creating quite a stir. People were coming around to watch him do it, like he was performing some sort of magic trick. And the judge in this case he wasn't even sure if this was larceny and ended up just finding the

man for disorderly conduct instead. Again coming back to that same conundrum, how do I How do I punish a man for stealing from an inhuman entity? Yeah, stealing from a machine? Really stealing? Now, another concern, of course with all this is that today we have problems with vending machines not working properly. You know, you go to you put in your money, you expect to get a candy bar, and it like sticks to the side. Right. So obviously you had similar issues back in the day with these

clumsier machines. I'd imagine even more often, right, Like you try to get the gum out of the clown's mouth, but instead it just kind of makes a grinding noise. Yes, and uh, I think one of the more I mean when when you look at the history of vending machines, on one hand, you see like the definite areas where people realize, yes, we're gonna use these to sell candy,

we're gonna sell cigarettes. These are the obvious uses. But what I really loved about researching this was seeing the various areas where they were just throwing it ato everything to see what would stick. There was a real flash in the pan since too many of these applications stuff, some of the stuff generated attention but then didn't find

a place in society. And yet you still see early versions of vending devices that we now take for granted gasoline pumps, water pumps, well maybe not beer spigots, but you also had these beer spigot feed put money into and then you fill up your your glass. I don't know, there's some pretty strange vending machines out there today, and it's it's still a developing field. Yeah, Like I'm sure you've read about like live animal vending machines, like they're

live lobster vending machines and live crab vending machines. I did enjoy when I was in China several years back. I got to see a wine vending machine when you put your money, and it was very high tech too, you know, I had the computer interface, but ultimately you would get an entire bottle of wine out of it. Oh bottle. It wasn't like a spigot of no, not a bigot like. It was just it was distributing full bottles of wine. U Now. The eighteen nineties also saw

the birth of the slot machine. Now not the gambling engine that would evolve from it and keep its name, but basic coin operated machines that sold various odds and end so cigarettes, stationary, et cetera. So early on there was a link between vending machines and gambling machines, and sometimes the blurring of that line would help you get around gambling restrictions. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of

a whole episode. Maybe it was more than one episode that we did for stuff to able in your mind about the slot machine, about gambling and gambling psychology and gambling devices and an automated gambling. Yeah. And if there's a I mean, there's a clear history here. That's that's part of the legacy of vending machines, is the gambling machine. You would not have the gambling machine without these early

vending machines. You know, we often see new technologies take on a kind of chic appeal, and I do wonder sometimes if you would have seen that in early vending machines, like when a vending machine became the new way you could buy an item in a place, Like what it would people come to think that an item bought from a vending machine as opposed to bought from a human. Uh,

selling point would be cooler, would be better? Yeah, I mean, it's the basic novelty attraction, right, Like, here's this new technology, this new way of doing this thing I was going to do anyway. I think one of the best examples of this, uh is the is the rise and ultimately the fall of automats. So I always think about that scene in Dark City with the Yes, there's a wonderful

scene with an automat and Dark City. If you don't know what we're talking about, and or you haven't seen Dark City, we're talking about a restaurant in which the walls are lined with all of these these little doors with little windows, and behind each window you see a plate or dish, you know, some sort of food that's prepared, and you put your coin in and then you open that little door and then you take the plate. So it's like apple green jello sandwich. And these were real.

This was this was something from Dark City that you can you can take to the bank. The first of these opened in Berlin in and uh, and you know it was it was true novelty because you'd be you'd be hard pressed to find a true automat today. A but the basic concept lives on and probably my one of my favorite restaurant innovations, uh, the conveyor Belt Sushi restaurant. If you've been to one of these jokes, no I haven't, I've heard you talk about it. Oh, it's it's marvelous.

I highly recommend everyone go to one. Afterwards, you will feel cheated if a human brings you your food at a restaurant as opposed to a conveyor belt that has tiny little plates with the with like bubble canopies over them. So at the on the conveyor belt, how do they keep track of what food you have taken? Oh? Well,

they have a fabulous system. At least. The place that that I frequent because my my child loves it and I love it too, is that after you're done, you have to stick the plate into a receptacle and it counts the plates, so you're charged by the plate, and you're also encourage there's gamification here as well. You're encouraged to insert more plates because if you hit I want to say it's like fifteen plates, you get a little prize.

It comes out lay up ending machine. So it's this wonderful collision of these different vending machine concepts into one food delivery system. Now, it's also worth pointing out that even though the automat went away in many ways, it lives on in just modern cafeterias. Yeah, And ultimately, I guess it comes down to the fact that you really didn't have to have the food behind all those little locked doors. You just had to have it in a wrapper.

You just need to have it in some steamer trays, put up some sneeze guards, and have what one two humans around just to make sure you didn't do anything stupid. You can never really make sure, though, Robert, you never can. I've worked in the grocery store. I know what people do with food items. I guess it comes down to what do the vast majority of the of of the customers do with the food items? Right? The vast majority

of people are very nice and very well behaved. It's not everybody sticking their arm up the cola machine or or trying to, you know, to to cheat it with little you know, disks of lead or something, or poking popsicle sticks down in there. That's when I tried, What was wrong with me? Why was I so into defrauding machine? You just wanted to It was just your rage against

the machine, Joe, Fully, what was going on? It's kind of a little boy scout in other ways, like I never would have done that to you were a natural, buttal arian is where you were. I guess. All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take one more break and we come back. We're gonna talk a little bit about just the legacy of vending machine technology. Alright, we're back.

So of course vending machines still exist, right, you know, they're all over the place, and they're now fully adapted to the modern economy, many accepting credit cards and so forth, and a lot of them have less cute mechanical tricks behind them. Now they're just sort of electronic, and you know that's that's fine. Yeah, I mean I like it when there's an arm, when there is some sort of

robotic component, um like there's a uh. You can still find ice cream machines that do this where a little lid and a cooler will open hind glass and an arm will go down and and grab one of the uh the the ice cream pops and bring it out. And I love that because there's a sense of drama to it. Yes, will the claw be able to do it? Or will I be or I or will I have to call this eight hundred number on the side of

the machine and inevitably talk to another automaton. Well that is one uh that that is one appeal of the machine, right, that there is an inherent delight in watching how some machines work. Most vending machines aren't really like this. They're they're not all that exciting. But these are these other ones. Things with arms like these are coming back to the automatons of heroes day and then medieval well, you know, wonder devices, the philosophical toys they were sometimes called. They

put on a show. Yeah, they put on a show, and they made you think about what was happening. And it wasn't just a matter of yeah, I want an

ice cream and I'll pay a dollar for it. But in terms of legacy, I do want to think about how the vending machine, even the early rudimentary vending machines, did kind of portend something even more significant thing about the the automation of the service economy in general, because you can, of course point to plenty of vending machines that still existing seven airports all the time and selling

headphones and stuff like that. But in a way, you can also look at, for example, online commerce as an extension of the principle of the vending machine across time and space. It's shopping without the interaction with a human vendor. You make your selection from an automated display, you pay an automated cashier, and then you receive your item without having to meet anybody. Yeah, what is say, Amazon dot

Com but the biggest vending machine of all time? Right, you can buy everything from it, But even in in person purchasing, there is there has been a push, at least in many cases, to try to automate aspects of the of the service relationship. Right Yeah, I think of grocery stores, gas pumps. I mean, basically, the sort of world that was predicted in early vending machine ventures is

what we're living in today. We just managed to keep a few human action interactions around, uh, you know, for flavor and and or to enforce the honor system, and to provide flexibility that machines don't have. The human can be there for when something goes wrong or when someone has an unusual need or request, and to service the machines. Of course. However, I have to say I'm a little amazed that one particular vending machine designed didn't take off.

This one is also mentioned in C. Gray's book Comes From And it's the back of the movie theater seat candy machine that is pretty brilliant. Yeah, like every seat in the theater and then you have a candy machine right on the back of your seat. Just imagine how how perfect and perfectly annoying that would be. I mean, I would hate that because I never buy candy at the movies. I would I would despise it Ben for that very reason. I'm surprised that it's not happening right now.

I suspect that maybe the reason that didn't take off is that you want to get people out of the theater into the lobby so that they buy more. There's only so much you can sell through a back of the seat vending machine, right You could, by increasing the convenience of selling one popular item actually decrease overall sales if you just like make it too easy to get that one popular thing without people having to be tempted by all these other less popular things. But on the

other hand, some people are not going to want. I don't want to get up in the middle of the movie to go stand in line, or even not stand in line to buy food, but they're always telling you to. I know, but what if I could just buy, you know, a glass of wine and some twizzlers right there in my seat without involving any human interaction, which I clearly did not come to the movie theater for. What if you could just swipe your credit card and the ceiling

would rain popcorn on? Well, that would work too hot, buttered, of course, you know, Robert picking up from this, I wonder In fact, I was about to ask you, but I don't have to ask you because I've been to one with you, these new school restaurant that have you order through an automated touchscreen menu rather than talking to your servers. Oh, yes, we encountered this at an airport Lardia. Yeah, we were at a restaurant. Every restaurant I've been to

a LaGuardia in New York works like this. And what I wondered at that restaurant was do consumers behave in a measurably different way when they're ordering or buying through a machine than when they're ordering or buying through a person. And the data says in many cases, absolutely yes, people do behave different when they shop through machines versus when

they shop through human gatekeepers. I wanted to call attention to a interview piece I read by A. Gretchen Gavitt and the Harvard Business Review with Harvard business professor Ryan Buell, who talks about this change in human behavior with with automated selling versus human selling, and so one very common trend is in food sales. Think about like the restaurant that's got the automated ordering path or online ordering apps.

What what research has found is that people who order food through machines rather than people, tend to order more food and more customized food. So for example, there's no social barrier being a pain in the butt exactly. That's I think that's exactly. It's a Taco Bell. They had a digital app you could order through, so you didn't have to talk to a person, you just order in

the app and then pick it up. And what they found was that orders were more expensive when ordered through the app than when people talk had to talk to somebody to order, mostly because people picked more add on ingredients in the app, so it's like, yeah, I want

to add sour cream, I want to add whatever. Also, Chili's apparently reported that more people started ordering desserts when they could order through self service computers that were stationed at their tables, and movie theaters have reported that self

service kiosks mean people keep ordering more and more stuff. Well, you know, I think another aspect of this might be situations where you are relying on memory while you're ordering, you know, in kind of at times, at least for you know, people like me, a high pressure social situation.

You're at the front of the poke bowl line. You're trying to order your poke bowl and you're having to and people were looking at you, people were waiting on you, and you have to also remember all the things you just said and are saying, and also keeping in mind what you're about to order for your child or your or your you know, or somebody else who's you know,

fetching drinks or what have you. There're a lot of moving pieces, and if you can externalize that process or part of that process onto a screen, then it's it is a calmer situation for all involved. That's why we write are we checked things off on a sushi menu as opposed to telling the server? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. There's there's less pressure, there's less of a rush. But I think it's also very important that there's less fear of less self consciousness. Because I want to talk

about a couple of other studies. One was study that looked at liquor stores and they found if a liquor store switches over to self service, the market share of quote difficult to pronounce items increases more than eight percent. So people buy more hard to pronounce liquor products if they don't have to interact with a human when they buy them. So I won't be self conscious about trying to order Chartous chartroussa tros chartreuse. I think it's Chartrus.

Sounds good to me, but I would be a little hesitant. I would say that that bottle that the one at the horse on it, Robert. Have you ever done the online pizza app ordering? No? I haven't, but I have the thing they do. Yeah, so, like I know Domino's does that. I think they all do, all the big chains,

or maybe not all of them. Most of the big chains to do that now, and pizza chains that introduce automated online ordering find that people order higher calorie meals when they order through the app, and they also order with way more special instructions. You know, So if you're somebody who's like, I want the gluten free dough, but

not as a crust. I want it chopped up and sprinkled as a topping that people are more likely to do that on the app than they are talking to somebody on the phone, because, yeah, you don't feel like

you're inconveniencing anyone, right, you're ridiculously detailed order exactly. So it seems like a recurring feature is that people just might feel less self conscious when they order through a machine than when they order through a human And uh, the machine isn't going to judge what you eat, or how unhealthy what you're ordering is, or how complicated your special instructions are, or how you pronounce things. The machine

doesn't judge, there's no fear. It just takes the order mechanically. Now, of course, this isn't without downsides. In this article, Buell points out that a lot of companies also lose business from attempting to institute self service kiosks and stuff like that, because it might make customers feel like they're getting less value from the business, they're having to do too much work where they don't have the flexibility they would when

interacting with a human agent. A lot of it probably has to do with how easy these things are to interact with, But I wonder how how much that whole thing can be extrapolated not just to I mean most of this is focused on food, but can be extrapolated to commerce as a whole. When you go to a vending machine, when you order something online, when you order through a little iPad or something at your table instead of talking to a human or having to look a

human in the eye. When you do any of this buying purchasing behavior, how does that change how you spend your money and what choices you make with your life. And indeed, these are changes that certainly too many individuals like, we're not we're not even fully of aware aware of what's happening. While meanwhile, the companies that are rolling this out are often going to be hyper aware of what's happening.

They're going to you know, it's like McDonald's. They know you're going to spend a dollar more, and therefore they're going to do the math that and and figure out that this is the way of the future, that you need to be ordering through the machine so you'll spend more. I absolutely understand this working, like at the level I have personally experienced feeling the freedom to order things I would be embarrassed to order out loud with my voice if I ordered them on an app, like ordering some

kind of complicated request or request for extra stuff. And yet at the same time, like one thing that comes to mind is is really the domain of films? You know, obviously one can obtain any film you want pretty much, especially good films you can get through you know, digital means, and you can order a copy of it rented, etcetera. When you go into the right kind of video store. Think, I guess some people might be embarrassed to ask for certain titles, but there's also a pride in asking for

certain titles. Like you want you want to be recognized for being the person that that wants to watch leviathans, you know, like you want to you do want kind of a social connection and you want approval for participating in this transaction. And you're not gonna get that from the machine. You're not gonna be judged, but you're also not going to be celebrated. Well, it just highlights how the social aspects of commerce or a double edged sword.

Sometimes having a person there to react to you socially and engage with you socially is going to be a limiting factor in what you would do and how much you would indulge in all that because you're afraid of judgment. And other times it will be an empowering factor, or I don't know if the word is empowering, if it would be an encouraging factor, encouraging you to participate in this act of commerce because there's some kind of positive

social benefit to it. And if nothing else, I just want there to be a conveyor belt, you know, right at least there needs to be a sense of wonder. There needs to be uh, some sort of spectacle going on, even if it's just a small one. You know. One last thing I was thinking about is I've never tried

to cheat or defraud Amazon or anything like that. But I wonder, like if if my feeling from childhood is generalizable, that people, for some reason, while they would never try to steal from a human or physical brick and mortar store, would try to reach their arm up into the vending machine, does the same thing apply to these more modern worldwide vending machines like online commerce retailers or just normal stores that that delegate all of the selling functions to machines

and apps and stuff like that. I wonder to what extent we attribute Amazon with a little more agency than we than that we would then we would give say, you know, Coca cola machine. Yeah, all right, So there you have it. Uh. That is the episode of Invention for this week. We do hope that you will check out invention pod dot com. That is where you'll find

uh the existing episodes of the Invention Podcast. You'll also find links out to our social media accounts, and if you want to talk about this episode inside of a Facebook group, you should go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module because that is where we are known to hang out and discuss episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But we're also happy to talk about episodes of Invention. Huge thanks as always to Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this show, and to our excellent

audio producer, Torri Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.