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Comment by alwa | Hacker News Reader

That's quite the brochure. My favorite selling point is the way you can make the machine display products that it's doesn't actually have inside, sell them, and give the punter a digital IOU instead of the soda they tried to buy...

> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."

Somehow managing to turn a convenience-driven impulse buy into an additional chore to redeem later.

At the end of the day, there must be some angle I'm not understanding or these features wouldn't actually drive sales. I wonder if the idea is to vend digital products? Drive traffic to nearby physical stores through some kind of targeted digital coupon? Has anyone seen this kind of thing in the wild?

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Wow... the whole point of a vending machine is to get a soda when you want to have a soda, if you wanted to have a soda later you could get it (usually a lot cheaper) at a supermarket? I hope there's at least a warning message where you can abort your purchase before you get the "voucher" instead of the actual product?

The only thing that makes sense is referring you to a nearby similar machine.

But even that is madness.

I think the era of vending machine is mostly over, but nobody is admitting it.

> I think the era of vending machine is mostly over, but nobody is admitting it.

Why? Aren't they more practical than ever?

Can’t believe they missed the opportunity to have the non-present purchase represented by an NFT. A buzzword overlooked by Marketing!

Hah! "Dude, you have a lot of NFTs in your Metamask wallet, what is going on?"

"Oh, those are just all the snacks I badly wanted but were out of stock in the vending machine and I can redeem them at some vague time at some vague location. Why, did you want to buy them?"

>> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."

Speaking only for myself, this would not be long-term profitable for the vending machine company, as the cost of them fixing the boot-sized hole in the machine would be far higher than the $2 they stole from me.

Maybe it's nothing but a scam?

Place it somewhere where there are enough people that haven't tried it before and trick them into buying something they don't want. No one will ever use it more than once.

You're getting a soda's worth of money from every person who is tricked, and some will notice the trick before it happens or hear about it. I'm guessing it's not worth the price of the machine, tech, install costs and opportunity costs of a normal vending machine.

The real scam is the ones that require you to load a card instead of using them directly. Usually seen at newer laundromats and such - arcades, too.

The most scammy make it so you can only load the card in multiples of ten but the machines all cost prime amounts.

All the scooter companies are trying that load by $5 and $10 thing now. Squeezing the last few drops from the stone I guess

Yep, this is just evil. I have already changed laundromats because the one I used to use started doing this.

But at least this practice does make their spying ways more obvious.

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