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October 18, 2006 12:03 AM

Broken: Drink vending machine

Colawater Michael Flarn Norton submits a picture taken in Niagara Falls, Canada:

The screen of the vending machine reads "COLA," but the vending machine features water as the only option.

Also, charging $2.50 is a very unreasonable price for a small bottle of water.

Comments:

You can't spell "water" with four 7-segment digits...

$2.50 for a bottle at a big tourist's site? Rather cheap from my experience. :->

(Not that I'd approve of that...)

Posted by: Cimddwc at October 18, 2006 04:01 AM

Yeah, I'm with Cimddwc on this. If you think $2.50 for a bottle of water is expensive, don't go to Disney, you won't be happy.

Expensive water at Niagra Falls... figures.

Posted by: Haggai at October 18, 2006 07:17 AM

And a reminder that, not only is this only $2.50 at a tourist site...when you convert to USD it's only about $2.20. Still not normal prices, but not entirely unreasonable, presuming it's a tourist location in NF.

Posted by: Cafemusique at October 18, 2006 09:12 AM

Hell, I've gotten beverages on a tour boat, on Lake Ontario for only CDN 2.50, and that was served by a real, live person.

Machines are supposed to make things cheaper by cutting out the labour cost. Vending machines seem to do just the opposite. Therefore, I hereby proclaim that vending machines are broken.

Posted by: Glenn Lasher at October 18, 2006 09:29 AM

$2.50 is way to much to pay for a bottle of water.

However if people are paying it, its not broken.

Posted by: arcticJKL at October 18, 2006 10:58 AM

You can fill up well over a hundred bottles with tap water for that price.

Posted by: Zephyr at October 18, 2006 01:35 PM

Maybe its a display with a horizontal going message saying, "this water tastes better then cola" and the picture is just snapped at the word cola

hmm pretty far fetched, okay it's broken

Posted by: gravano at October 18, 2006 05:08 PM

If it's a Coca Cola Bottling Co. machine, then the circuitry is all programmed with that the machine doesn't know what paper insert is behind the plastic button, or what's printed on the plastic diffuser in front, or what's on the rack inside. All that's configurable seems to be the price for a button.

Posted by: Trent Chernecki at October 18, 2006 06:26 PM

Not broken. Almost all vending machines are programmed to say cola.

Posted by: Sean Z. at October 25, 2006 11:15 AM

Also there is the limitations of the LED display there. It only contains seven segments like:

_

| |

-

| |

_

so it can't readilly display "Water", "COLA" is easier.

Posted by: FireAlarmFanatic at October 26, 2006 10:03 AM

Would't be so difficult to spell H2O, though. They could even shave off one digit and make the machine cheaper, thus allowing them to reduce the price of the ware from $2.50 to $249. Win-win.

Posted by: Sven Geier at November 1, 2006 04:14 PM

The display isn't change because it is a certain model of machine from COCA COLA.

Enter the diagnostics menu and change the price (on some versions of this machine).

Posted by: zzo38 at November 5, 2006 11:43 PM

O, and if it has that particular diagnostics then you can also turn off the "ICE COLD COCA COLA" display as well on that menu.

Posted by: zzo38 at November 5, 2006 11:44 PM

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