The vending machine

Peter Panda — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 03:02:25 +0000

Back in the late 1980s, we had a vending machine & a soda machine. Neither of them would accept $1 bills & the vendor that we used wouldn’t provide us with a change machine.

This meant, more often than not, that when an employee was on break, they needed to go to the front registers & ask a cashier for change. The problem was, unless the store was extremely slow, the employee would get stopped on his/her way to get change. Even if the employee took off his/her smock, customers could “sniff them out” & by the time they got ready to start their break (15 minutes, 30 for lunch), a good amount of it was already over…

The break room was also a place where many of the employees smoked… yes, for all you Generation Z readers, smoking indoors was allowed & quite popular.

Back to the vending machine… as mentioned, the company who provided service wouldn’t give us more modern machines that had $1 bill capabilities. But to some of the smokers, this was ok, because there was a glitch in one or two locations in the machine where if you pressed the button that was holding a row of cigarettes in a certain manner, the machine would continue to distribute packs of cigarettes until the entire row was depleted. Yes, you read that correctly – cigarettes were being sold in the vending machine! And because the vending machine was so old and not well maintained, malfunctions would sometimes happen…

Serves the vending company right for not providing us with a change machine or a vending machine that took $1 bills…

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The vending machine