Vending life

::: nBlog :::

Japan seems to be a land of vending machines. One runs into arrays of them in restaurants, barber shops, subway stations, grocery stores, and even temples. Many of them just take money, credit cards or the local Suica NFC card and give you.. a printed slip to be handed over to the sales person.

While those machines surely automate accounting and parts of bookkeeping, most of them don’t seem to be connected in any way. Every day someone from the vending machine company visits to fill in change money and to make sure that the machine works flawlessly.

Spiming and connecting these machines into the cloud would introduce radical efficiency gains what comes to service speed and reliability. It is, however, only the first step – eventually the service itself, e.g. a haircut, will be spimed and there will be no need for the physical machine or paper slips.

Although these vending machine companies are now propagating somewhat obsolete technology, they are in a prime position to introduce new spime ways of operations to their numerous customers. And the barber is probably happy to replace the bulky machine with one more revenue-generating chair.

//Pasi from Tokyo