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Japan Runs on Vending Machines. It’s About to Break Millions of Them.
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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You would think it would be possible to just swap out the currency mechanism and not the entire machine. Seems like there's an opportunity there somewhere...
Alternately, get a bill exchanger. New bill goes in, old bill comes out.
In Europe, we changed to the Euro not that long ago. I was a student and I used to use a shared laundry machine. It was the day before returning to school. I was barely alone in the dorms. Let's do a laundry !
The machines were updated to get euros. There was another machine just to change the coins, especially since the washing machines only took one kind of coin (20 cents).
I put one fresh euro in the exchange machine, expecting to get 5 coins of 20 cents.
Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ... Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ... Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ...
What ?! The machine was buggy and would not stop. I grabbed a hoodie to put the coins in it. Soon, it was not enough. After what seems to be an eternity I was there with around 50€ and kilos of coins.
Reminds me of this vending machine that confused the amount of change it should give me with some error code it displayed in the high thousands, and went jackpot on me, spitting out all its coins.
must’ve messed up some mundane detail
These machines probably run on floppy disks.
In Japan tech is either cutting edge or ancient scrolls
Yeah this really shouldn't be that difficult. Pop the old bill reader out and swap a new one in. It seems like there's a pretty big financial incentive for someone to figure out how to implement that, at least for the most common vending machine models.
I was kinda surprised by the article since almost every vending machine I see takes credit cards. I’ve never used a vending machine in a Ramen shop though
Most vending machines take IC (the NFC-style top-up cards that Japan also runs on), but ALL vending machines take cash.
It should be possible to swap out the reader, but they might be built in such a way that the entire machine has to be taken away and cannot be serviced on-site for security's sake. I have never seen anyone servicing a vending machine in public.
This could be something that causes Japan to rethink its cash dependancy.
I see people servicing vending machines in public all the time, but the ones out in the city it happens at 2-5am. The ones in my building, it's roughly weekly at noon. Most of the ones I pass with any regularity don't have any IC functionality, but we still keep a Waon card around for when we're visiting nearby cities
Hey! I know it's been a couple weeks but I figured I'd say that I went down to the lobby at 10am just now, and there's two guys in there right now swapping out the cash reader. There's the regular restocker doing his job and a second guy with one of the handheld firmware loader things, I'm not sure if it just needs a software change or if he needs to be there to swap the actual slot, but it does look swappable
The insides are really crazy custom crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzxW3B3_Pak
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I’m getting Y2K vibes,
It's funny you say that, because this scenario was how I explained it back in the day...
Imagine the US comes out with a shiny new quarter, it's super cool, but won't fit in any existing coin slot.
Upgrading one machine isn't too bad if you know what you're doing, but then doing every machine on a block, or a street, or a city, or a state? Suddenly way more complicated.
Oh, and they ALL have to be done by a specific date.
my dad was a UNIX sysadmin. His assertion- at the time- that we'd be fine, did not live up the vast amounts of overtime he put in in during '99.
(To be clear it was never the then-modern systems, like windows ME, or '95 that were at problem. it was all the old-as fuck stuff... every major institution still uses. Like IRS's COBOL database... that's... still being...used.all of that stuff, they needed to patch to make it okay.)
Just wait until 2038. More overtime!
he just retired this year!
(so... uh... what happens in 2038?) (edit... I'll worry about 2038 if we actually get to 2030.)
Unix time starts January 1st, 1970 and counts the number of seconds since then.
Right now it is 1718265480 (approximately).
That's stored in a 32 bit signed integer. It hits max int in January of 2038.
UNIX epoch limit. Date goes back to 1970
Depending on the age of the machine, you could maybe just update the firmware. I mean, what's it comparing the bills put into the machine to? Data hardwired into it or a file stored somewhere that can be changed?
It's the cost of doing so that's their main worry. And the ramen now traditionally is ¥1000. Doing all the changes would mean raising prices above that number and they're afraid it would keep customers away.