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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

And this requires absolutely zero screens, cameras, or demographic data collection of any kind. Just track the inventory. This isn't new; I would be extremely surprised if Japanese vending machines didn't do just that for decades already.

But those cameras aren't there because of the vending machine. That is just a convenient platform. This is about ads, and tracking, and data brokering. We had digital ad screens placed on the platforms at train stations in the Netherlands with a camera hole a few years ago, and the advertising company swore that those cameras would not be activated, for now, until the legal side was resolved, or until they could get away with it without anyone noticing.

It feels icky.

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Unfortunately they're popping up in Japan too, I just walked past this one https://ibb.co/27nh6gZ

While I agree with you, the benefit is that it's automatic. That's the difference. It doesn't require anyone to count and track anything. It doesn't require thought or planning. It just happens. It doesn't require money spent on people to keep track of.

Whereas classic vending machine inventory systems requires an human person to track the re-fills or sales.

A happy medium would be no stupid cameras, but with electronic tracking and reporting of what is sold. That has to be a thing that can be done, right?

> the benefit is that it's automatic

I wouldn't trust this automatic data for shit. When's the last time you used a vending machine that did not have any problems? The classic meme of people beating on a machine because something got stuck. How is that inventory managed? Does the inventory decrement every time someone pushes buttons to vend an item? Is it tracked by weight? Who enters the weight?

This seems like a system ripe for abuse by the manufacture on needing maintenance like the McDonald's soft server machine.

> Whereas classic vending machine inventory systems requires an human person to track the re-fills or sales.

Sorry?

You order by the # of the item.

This is recorded in NVRAM/sent to cloud nowadays.

There is absolutely no need to involve any human being in the process of tracking sales.

Your happy medium is what happens today in normal vending machines without cameras or giant screens. The normal boring glass-front ones that barely take credit cards.

The guy with a clipboard counting how many Diet Coke cans are missing hasn't been the way these things are managed since probably 2003.

> That has to be a thing that can be done, right?

That's exactly how the vending machines at my workplace operate. No screens or weird tracking (as long as you avoid the stupid "pay on your phone with our app" option). The machine knows exactly how many of what items it has dispensed and when without any of that nonsense.

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