Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2000 By Ryan Sager 

In 1888, a man named Thomas Adams installed the first Tutti Frutti machines on the platforms of New York City’s elevated trains, dispensing gumballs for a penny.

From those humble beginnings in New York, America’s vending industry has become big business. Just last year it posted more than $34 billion in sales, pushing products ranging from Wall Street Journals to prepaid phone cards to double lattes — all without the need for clerks or storefronts or a laptop to log on to kozmo.com or Urban Fetch.

This is a far cry from the state of the industry when my grandfather got into it during the Depression. Then, jukeboxes and pinball machines were at the forefront of machine vending, and were just starting to enter the mainstream of American life. He started his own firm by buying jukeboxes and placing them in restaurants. As he used to explain, even during the Depression people were willing to put down a nickel to hear a few big-band numbers. And back then, a nickel would buy you more than a fifth of a song.

Grandpa built his business box by box. If you owned a restaurant, cafe or bar around Hartford, Conn., and you had a jukebox, you came to know Abe Fish, and his network of outlets eventually allowed him to expand into pinball and later other games. By the time he sold General Amusement Games to a candy and soda vending company in the 1970s, he was operating early video games like Asteroids and Pac-Man that hadn’t been so much as a dot on the horizon when he started out more than 30 years before.

As astonishing as the distance between gumballs and Pac-Man may be, my grandfather would probably be even more amazed by how different vending machines look today. Core products like soda, candy, music and arcade games are still around, of course. But the drugstore, the grocery store, the ice-cream parlor and the novelty shop have all made their way into machine display cases. Forget your toothbrush on a business trip? It’s in your hotel lobby, along with toothpaste, aspirin and a comb. Need a small toy to keep your toddler busy? Many small, plastic distractions can be found in machines in supermarkets and malls.

But the real revolution is less in products than in technique. Vending machines are slowly taking on the efficiencies of wireless technology. With cellular connections it will be possible to monitor machine stock continuously, and the means of payment will change too.

Currently, accepting paper money is about as advanced as most American vending machines get. The industry has worked itself into a lather over the new dollar coin, going so far as to lobby for the elimination of the one-dollar bill to encourage the coin’s use. But as we head toward a cashless society, such a coin obsession seems hopelessly behind the times.

The technology exists, and is widespread in Japan and Europe, to allow vending machines to accept debit and credit transactions. And while we play catch-up, even more interesting ideas are being explored. One U.S. company, Televend, has developed the technology to allow customers to purchase items from vending machines using their cell phones. Given a number on a vending machine, a customer could dial, connect to the machine, enter his selection and pay electronically.

Alas, such breathtaking convenience remains years away from our shores. Why so long? Perhaps demand is not as high in America to completely automate everyday life — though e-commerce seems to be eroding that instinct daily. Maybe then, Americans don’t entirely trust the wisdom of buying every last product from a machine.

I must admit — despite the pull of family pride — that there are certain items that don’t yet strike me as kosher coming from a vending machine. Is a rose purchased from an airport machine romantic in a hip, postmodern way or simply tacky? Likewise, you can find both live bait and canned lobster bisque in vending machines these days — and one sounds as unappetizing as the other.

Regardless of such apprehensions, vending will continue to grow for one reason: It’s fun. There is simply something enjoyable about a machine that dispenses shiny new products — and if such machines could be made so graceful as to accept sleek looking debit cards or commands from our cherished cell phones, they might just attain perfection. Lastly, the machines have a leveling effect. The Wal-Mart customer and the Starbucks connoisseur find common ground when they feel like getting a candy bar or a soda in the middle of the night. Whatever small need you may have, and whenever you might have it, a vending machine can probably take care of it. In my grandfather’s time that meant a song or a game of pinball to forget your worries; today it just might mean T-shirts in a can.

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Mr. Sager, a senior at George Washington University, is working on the Journal’s editorial page this summer.