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. <pause>… Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. <pause>… Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. <pause>…
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.
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.
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
These machines probably run on floppy disks.
In Japan tech is either cutting edge or ancient scrolls
