I can buy seven kinds of hot or cold coffee on nearly every corner from Shibuya to the deepest inaka. People outside Japan often focus on the wacky vending machines, but the real story is the incredible availability and quality of the standard-issue 自販機. The engineering story of how vending machine manufacturers repurposed exhaust for heat while keeping cold drinks cool alone is worth the price of admission.
I'll keep my thoughts about American vending machines (and coffee vending in particular) to myself.
When I was a kid, stuck in a hospital waiting for hours, I poked a pencil up into the bottom of the cup stack of their automated coffee machine. The kind that drops a cup down and fills it.
In retrospect, an asshole thing to do. I was, though, at the time, highly amused. Doctors would walk up, pay their quarter, watch the coffee fill up, then slowly drain.
The coffee vending machine in the math department at the University of Maryland had a sticker on it with a medallion that proclaimed that it won some prestigious award for great coffee.
My friend and I would meet for coffee and to laugh at and admire it, as if there's some competition between vending machines for best coffee, and it was a hard-won legitimate award like a boxing title, with judges and urine tests, that our coffee vending machine successfully defended every year.
But I'll be damed if it wasn't really great coffee! We kept coming back for more.
Are there really awards for great coffee vending machines? Are they for brands, or individual machines? Or was it just effective advertising and the placebo effect? It it possible to buy fake award stickers to affix to vending machines that subjectively improve the taste of their products? Or maybe there was some addictive mind altering ingredient in the coffee it dispensed.
I know that feeling. When we first moved northward of Tennessee, everybody would tell us about how great this little convenience store was. I, as someone who'd grown up thinking names like Wawa were stupid and dumb, refused to shop there for a long time, despite having to drive past it for somewhere else.
One day, I was in too much of a hurry to skip them and stopped at the unfortunately named convenience store, only to marvel at its wonders. It had coffee, of course, as convenience stores tend to, but it also had a coffee bar, complete with easily poured syrup containers of sugar (if you're into that), and a variety of different creamers in half gallon containers so that I didn't have to fumble with those little creamer packs, readily available stirrers, etc. It was amazing. Of course, convenience store coffee is terrible. It's a rule -- only, this wasn't. I mean, I'm a coffee snob -- I buy my coffee from a micro-roaster who issues the beans just after degassing, and I usually prepare the coffee in either an Aeropress or a pourover system. I had an instant hot-water dispenser installed at the kitchen sink set to exactly 210 degrees... but, despite that snobbery, Wawa somehow managed to eke out a drinkable cup of coffee, and with all the extraneous luxuries they offered, it was nothing short of amazing.
7-11 and other convenience stores have started catching on to the coffee bar aspect of things, but for some reason, Wawa still stands alone in making a drinkable cup for about ~$1.
This does not include the games vending machines for the nintendo entertainment system in Japan, where you could come with a blank disk, pay with money and go back with a game on that disk that you could use on a NES with a disk drive.
I once had a business trip (TDY) to Aviano Air Base, Italy. The office building we were in had an Espresso vending machine that for 0.5 Euro made a legit Espresso or Americana. We need these in the US and I can't help but think they would be a big hit in certain places. (Looking at you, Costco)
Some WinCo and Albertson's near Seattle have a large red coffee machine, where you can't get a decent cup for $1. Similarly, Starbucks has been providing the "Starbucks Microsoft" machine to Microsoft and other offices for over a decade.
Like self-check, this is another instance where we have the automation but do not use it. Automation is eating the world, except where it's not.
Italians are insane about the ubiquitous availability of espresso at all times.
I once took a BUS TRIP from Abruzzo to Rome. they had complementary espresso made on the bus from a machine tucked into a nook next to the toilet entrance. Try that on your Bolt Bus !
I don't get one thing: since current coffee can dispense great coffee, cheaper, altough it cannot replace the social roles of a coffee shop why isn't one installed close to any coffee shop?
Coffee is a dairy / flavor delivery platform for a lot of people. I don't think even the best vending machines can't compete with the selection of creamers and flavors a coffeeshop has to offer. There's also a lot of snobbery involved so even if the products were identical some people would enjoy a vending machine version less simply because they couldn't complain about the barista making it wrong or being too slow.
I have a nasty old drip coffee machine (the type you find in hotels, very high milage) sitting next to my fancy espresso machine at home exactly to make this type of coffee. I love all of god's coffee children.
I can buy seven kinds of hot or cold coffee on nearly every corner from Shibuya to the deepest inaka. People outside Japan often focus on the wacky vending machines, but the real story is the incredible availability and quality of the standard-issue 自販機. The engineering story of how vending machine manufacturers repurposed exhaust for heat while keeping cold drinks cool alone is worth the price of admission.
I'll keep my thoughts about American vending machines (and coffee vending in particular) to myself.