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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

> They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective.

It's the "good ads" argument -- this machine can guess your age/gender and offer up items most purchased by your demographic, all the while feeding that data back to the vendor. Who wouldn't love that? :-/

More seriously, this has been a standard capability in vending machines, fast food menu systems, and digital signage in general for over a decade. Check out this ad from 2012 for Intel's AIM Suite for an example of how this stuff is pitched: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdMIp2vQjG8

"Is the viewer a teenage girl? Then change to content to highlight a back-to-school shoe sale a few doors down. Is it a senior male? Then why not tell him about the golf club sale at the sporting goods store?"

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The "good ads" people need a "hammer to the face."

I'm okay with that flavor of "good ads".

I'm fine with a machine taking my observable physical characteristics and using that to select ads for me. I'm also fine with ads that are not so much targeted as self-selected.

It's the use of non-observable, non-public info to build and reference an advertising profile where I start to object. It's creepy, and the ads are somehow less relevant.

The technique in restaurants is to track the number of items sold, add innovative special dishes every day or week, and at the end of every week or month, remove the worst selling items on the menu and replace it with one of the special dishes. This over time creates demand. Vending machines can do the same. Remove the worst selling item and replace it with anything. After a time, the vending machine will only sell items with demand for that location.

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.

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.

My experience is the opposite - vending machines tend to run out of the really popular stuff and they just don't replace it until most of the crap stuff is gone.

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