They sell umbrellas, flowers and cooked meals, cough up cool drinks after earthquakes and even try to read your mind: They are Japan’s 5 million vending machines.
Scattered across the country, the automated stores are about as ubiquitous as traffic lights and offer an ever-widening, dizzying palette of goods.
Thanks to Japan’s low crime rate, companies have placed them everywhere, from neon-lit city centers to the icy summit of Mount Fuji, with little risk of them being burgled and relieved of their rich coin vaults.
PHOTO: AFP
“They are so convenient, I wish I had one in my room,” said 18-year-old Tokyo resident Hibiki Miura, who like many Japanese finds it hard to imagine modern civilization without the handy helpers.
Japan has 2.5 million vending machines that sell just beverages — about one for every 50 people. They generated a staggering US$27 billion last year, the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers’ Association says.
Machines that sell other miscellaneous goods — from cigarettes to toys, flower bouquets and even printed oracles at Shinto shrines — raise the total to more than 5 million, according to industry estimates.
In the world’s most saturated vending machine market, providers are competing ever more fiercely to be noticed above the machines’ neon-glare and the clatter of change with novel new offerings.
Dole Japan turned heads when it set up a banana vending machine at a Tokyo train station in June, selling chilled bananas for ¥130 (US$1.50) each or a bunch of about five for ¥390.
“You can buy bananas at convenience stores or supermarkets, but people seem to find it fun to buy them from a vending machine,” Dole spokeswoman Hiromi Ohtaki said. “People think it’s fun to watch, fun to buy and fun to eat.”
Some machines provide added social functions, such as news flashes and baseball scores on electronic display boards.
Coca-Cola says 5,100 of its 980,000 machines will roll out drinks free in the wake of major earthquakes and other disasters.
Most recently, a machine provided 680 bottles of beverages to people who fled their homes in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido when a quake in distant Chile triggered a tsunami alert for Japan in February.
At the other end of the Japanese archipelago, in a remote village of subtropical Okinawa, Coca-Cola says it supports a nature survey with vending machine-mounted microphones that record chirps of rare birds.
The very latest in high-tech vending machines even attempts to make the consumer’s choice for them, using a camera and software that recognizes a person’s sex and 10-year age band with about 75 percent accuracy.
Using the point-of-sale data, the machine at Tokyo’s Shinagawa train station may look at a person and suggest a sports drink or a chilled can of espresso based on its accumulated marketing wisdom.
Trying the machine recently, Hidemi Mio, 48, said that after scrutinizing her with its digital brain for a second, it recommended three drinks on its 47-inch touch-screen display, including a flavored tea.
Happily, the machine guessed correctly, picking one of her favorites, she said, adding that she would take on board the machine’s suggestions again in future, especially “when I can’t make a decision.”
Payments can be made with swipe cards and cellphones as well as cash.
To protect consumers’ privacy, images are deleted immediately, but data on sex, age and purchasing choice is accumulated, said Toshinari Sasagawa, general manager for sales at JR East Water Business, which operates the machine.
“We’ve got data on what was sold, where and when. On top of that, we’ll get information on customer attributes, which we hope to use for a better product lineup and development,” he said.
The machine has been a hit since it was set up last month, Sasagawa said. Its sales are triple that of any of the other 50 vending machines in the same station he said, while declining to disclose exact sales volume.
JR East Water Business, wholly owned by the giant railway operator, plans to set up 500 units of the “next-generation” machine over the next two years.
In future, vending machines may increase their “communications with people,” Sasagawa said. “We want customers to experience and enjoy a purchasing process that is different from simply buying from a vending machine.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver