Japan is bracing for rage against the vending machine | Hacker News Reader

Japan is bracing for rage against the vending machine

businessinsider.com

19 pointsrntn11 comments

> In April, the Bank of Japan said that despite the growth in cashless payments, it expects "the demand for cash, which can be readily used by anyone, anywhere, and at any time," will continue to play a significant role in the economy.

I'm all for carrying cash, but clearly it's not the case that you can use it anywhere at any time, if 80% of the vending machines in the country won't accept these new bills. When and if these machines get replaced, it would make sense for them to accept both cash and cards. If that happens, you'd think it would only accelerate the move away from cash in Japan.

Problem is that machines are used to run businesses like ordering at a mom and pop restaurants, and replacement is around $19k.

Odds are that rather than replacing the machines, society will make sure to hold on to the old money longer and the new bills will be not accepted by people.

The article talks about counterfeit but doesn't talk about it in detail. Do these vending machines accept counterfeit old bills? If so, it seems like at some point genuine old bills will be scarce making it very likely that people desperate for old bills will more likely reach these counterfeit old bills?

I find it amazing this happened.

In the US, when they came out with the "gold" dollars, they did extensive testing to make sure they would work in the machines just like the old SBA Dollars. I think the same was true when they change the design of paper money.

But now in the US, it hardly matters since the machines now take Credit Cards. And people in the US tend to live off those cards.

Which is doubly silly because nobody uses dollar coins in the US. You have to explicitly request them from a bank to even get them. And then if you try to use it, most workers have never even seen one before and might be reluctant to accept it as they don't know that it's real.

Yes, all the US dollar variants since then have had the same size and weight. The latter distinguishes them from Canadian dollar coins that are the same size (within wear tolerance).

"Bracing" -- one of those words that headline writers couldn't do without

Yeah I had quite a bit of trouble last autumn using subway ticket machines with the new Y500 coin, which came out in 2021

Surely if you're going round and retrofitting all the machines, retrofit them with contactless/suica readers?

I expect that there will just be unspoken gotchas like that 500 yen coin, "We do not do that here" or "110 yen coins only" signs on machines etc

People will just hoard old money and exchange new bills for old at banks rather than the other way around.

Eh. Vending machines take Suica and Japan only issues notes for ¥1000+. A drink is like ¥100-150. The new ¥500 coins have been around for 3 years.

Not all machines even in Tokyo accept IC cards, and despite new coins being aroud for 3 years there are a lot of machines (more than half from my experience) that don't accept those coins. Some machines have a sign "we accept new coins" which means the default expectation is that they don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com