I discovered the coffee vending machine circa Tokyo 2012. The ¥90-95 amounted to roughly 1 USD. Though I’d only repeat the process three-four times in those few months, the concept must have forever altered my consciousness.
Before then I associated the vending machine with snickers bars, pringles, pepsi-cola and all that atrocity not deserving capital letters which, around the year 2000, I vowed to abandon for at least the next thousand years or lifetime remainder, whichever is longer.
Most contemporary coffee machines of recent years produce a cup and fill with espresso based liquid on demand. Sometimes there’s a reduced cost instant-coffee option.
In all my experience, it never fails: sugar level adjustable down to zero, volume as precise as Shylock’s kidney, even the dash of foam atop the liquid.
Tastes at least as bourgeois as anything equivalent at the most exclusively adorned patisserie, to whatever extent a lifetime of degustation might afford. Though I can’t imagine what even the most refined dandy might critique after the common sugar or milk profanation.
I far prefer the above mechanics to the traditional retract-and-dispense ways of those base consumables. How often do I see a flustered bloke beat, shake, twist and shout at that machine over a package trapped in the release lever clutches, all the while my judicious satirical propaganda caricature alter-ego coughs its lungs out, points, ridicules.
Now I’m quiet certain the Japanese machinery actually produced canned coffee using those same lousy mechanics. And yet the can arrived hot: not too hot to the touch, yet sufficiently hot to the taste.
It’s been over twelve years, but it must have happened. I couldn’t’ve simply imagined something this bizarre. The essence of it still triumphs over sushi and sashimi, bullet trains, quadruped robots, smartphones and Tesla.
It challenged my understanding of thermodynamics. I have no understanding of thermodynamics. Until a certain point I couldn’t even conceive how coffee could heat this swiftly, ignorant that process length was proportional to volume.
I guess it makes sense that duration should fluctuate with payload size. But theory alone didn’t satisfy. Until then, I held water heating to be the enterprise of boilers, stove tops, electric kettles, drip coffee makers and samovars: not opaque vending machines.
And here hot water arrived not just rapidly heated before I could pronounce ten Mississippi, but packaged into some non conductive aluminesque metal of most certainly extraterrestrial origin.
Since then I’ve discovered machines to dispense somewhat edible sandwiches and traditional Polish gourmet. Some coffee and tea machines occasionally offer hot Barszcz, or some semblance thereof, as the last desperado option. Portugal impressed all the more with the dispensing gamut, cost and value considered.
The other day I purchased a box of contact lenses from a gigantic vending machine more resembling an atomic reactor. Surprisingly cheaper over even mail ordering. No optometrist referral necessary. Numerous brands, mine included; most prescriptions available (save for astigmatism correction).
Nothing of dispensable nature surprises me anymore. But the coffee stands out. Something very intimate about the humanless delivery in transit stations, terminals, libraries and symbiotic Akihabara corridors.
Questions, comments? Connect.