Rodebaugh wrote:natsb88 wrote:Rodebaugh wrote:Anyone here ever loose their money to a Coke machine, or have their Andy Capp hot fries corkscrew off the platform only to get held up forever halfway down?
Don't trust the machine.......buy your gold and slim jims from a reputable human source
A machine like this would be built to a much higher standard than a machine dispensing 55 cent snack foods.
Oh, Without a doubt..... However, do you think it might still make a mistake or will it be perfect?
I haven't seen one in person so I don't know how well they are actually made, but it certainly *could* be made darn near perfect. These are dispensing very consistent goods, not different shaped containers or items like bagged food that have a tendency to get stuck. They are not designed as a universal machine with large screws you can stick anything into, but rather they are designed specifically for carded gold bars, so they can have much more specialized (and therefore reliable) mechanisms.
With a machine like this, the expectation of both the buyer and seller is that it will work perfectly every time (the seller could take a hit from a mistake just as easily as the buyer could...one wrong bar dispensed, or one doubled dispense, and there goes any profit from the last 50 transactions). So the incentive is there to invest in better precision and more reliable components.
The machine also uses a computer system to adjust pricing something like every 20 minutes, and to process credit cards. There is no doubt a simple feedback system can also be incorporated to verify that the correct product was dispensed before it is presented to the customer (weight, for instance, would be very easy to check).
Not having seen one I can't say how reliable they currently are, but being a mechanical engineering that likes to design this kind of stuff, I can say how reliable they could be. Don't think of them as vending machines in the typical sense, think of them as a hard money version of an ATM. Those deal with large amounts of cash, are very widely used, and have proven to be acceptably reliable, so I don't see why this would be any different.
Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2010 11:32 am
