The secret life of vending machines
Ever since an inventor in Wakefield patented a “self-acting machine” for the dispensation of stamps, vending machines have sustained everyone from factory workers to gym goers and students. Tom Lamont reports on their history – and strange appeal
A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and positioned like a trap between arrivals and the taxi rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or something to munch? I opted for Doritos, touching my card to the reader so that the packet was propelled forwards by a churning plastic spiral. The Doritos landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day.
Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, the man who owned that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These weird, conspicuous objects! For decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron, and I wanted to get to the bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made us buy? Johnny Brod seemed a good person to ask.
Freckle-tanned, portly and quick to laugh, Broderick has a playful exterior that conceals the fiery heart of a vending fundamentalist. He is a man so invested in the roboticised transmission of snacks that, come Halloween, he has been known to park a machine full of sweets in his driveway, letting costumed local kids issue their demand for treats via prodded forefinger. With his brother Peter and his father, John Sr, he runs the vending empire Broderick’s Ltd, whose 2,800 machines occupy some of the most sought-after corridors and crannies of the UK. They sugar and sustain office workers, factory workers, gym goers and schoolchildren. If you’ve ever wolfed a postpartum Snickers in the maternity ward at Leeds General, or turned thirsty while waiting to fly out of Stansted or Birmingham airports, then you’ve almost certainly shopped, at one mechanical remove, with Johnny Brod. He thanks you.
The coffee we drank that morning had trickled into cardboard cups from one of his own hot-beverage makers. Business had been hurt badly by Covid, he said. There had been one wretched day in the spring of 2020 when he awoke to find himself not the owner of the second-largest fleet of vending machines in the UK, but instead of “timebombs. All these machines of ours in places we couldn’t access. All full of perishable food.”
As Johnny Brod led me on a tour of his headquarters, I told him about my midnight purchase from the Broderick machine at the airport. Talk about a smooth transaction, I said. No snagging! I imagined he would be pleased to hear this, but he twitched his head in frustration, as if at a grave breach of etiquette. Vending people hated it, he explained to me, this expectation of failure. Modern machines contained many failsafes against botched vends.
Big change was sweeping through automated vending, he told me. All his machines were now fitted with a contactless card reader, meaning the Brodericks were the beneficiary of new and better information about their customers. Pre-Covid, not only did they have to go and fetch someone’s coppery quid – they didn’t even know whose quid it was. Now they understood us better. Johnny Brod had even released an app that tempted people with discounts in return for permission to track their habits.
He led us to a control room that had employees arranged Nasa-style, facing mounted screens on which stationary dots and travelling arrows identified thousands of vending machines and the technicians who roved between them. We watched a live ticking record of the day’s sales, north to Aberdeen, south to the Isle of Wight. A couple of clicks on a computer and we were marvelling at the snacking history of a loyal, I would say fanatical, Broderick customer in Manchester, who must have been sourcing two full meals a day from behind glass. As Johnny Brod made a note to slip this customer a thank-you tenner via the app, I asked his team if they’d be able to find the record of my midnight Doritos. A few keyboard taps later and there it was.
“At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. In Wakefield, a machine was tapped for Tango Orange”
What happened next in the wider world of these machines? I contacted some of Johnny Brod’s competitors and asked them to share sales data for that day in July. I enlisted volunteers to help me track vending activity around the globe. At 12.45am, a Twix dropped from a machine in Blackfriars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers on overnight standby thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Expired bottles of Mountain Dew turned another hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. At 7.31am, on a train-station platform in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, a machine was tapped for Tango Orange.
Wakefield is the birthplace of automated vending. In the 1850s, a local inventor patented a “self-acting machine” for the dispensation of stamps. Before the end of the century, beer and wine fountains became fashionable in Paris, while in the US, gumball machines sprouted everywhere. The moment they appeared, they were viewed as fair game to be swindled. Tricking vending machines was called “slugging”, because you fed in brass slugs – fake coins – instead of money. Hundreds of metal lozenges advertising boot polish were found inside a single machine in London in 1914. More than a century later, Johnny Brod told me that sluggers were still at large, only these days they tended to use counterfeit currency.
Broadly speaking, the vending game is built on deals between operators, who own machines, and site owners, who have the rights to advantageous pieces of land. Either a machine is placed on private property – a factory, for instance, where the site owner surrenders profits to the operator in return for keeping a workforce fed and present – or a machine is placed somewhere public, in an airport, say. Here the site owner will expect a cut of each item sold, anywhere from 10% to 30%.
We were discussing all this in the Broderick headquarters when Johnny Brod’s father, John Sr, wandered in to tell me how he founded the business in the 1960s with a single machine imported from the US. He struck a deal to put it in the foyer of Macclesfield Baths, and everything escalated from there. As the Broderick business grew, the family watched their rivals start to eat each other. For the past 20 years or so, vending has been dominated by corporations that have carved up the world into domains, absorbing regional operators. The big fish in Japan is a company called Glory. In the US, it’s Crane. Europe is ruled by Selecta, owned by a Swiss private-equity firm. On more than one occasion, Johnny Brod told me, he’d received calls from Selecta about the possibility of a buyout. But the Brodericks always said no. Unfinished business.
There are certain fundamental laws of vending. Chocolate bars are often down on the bottom shelves, nearest the fridge unit. Crisps are placed in the warmest part of the machine, up at the top. This part of the job, as delicate as flower arrangement, is known as planogramming. Fiona Chambers, who runs the vending company SV24-7, in the Scottish town of Alloa, and puts much thought into planograms, likes two central spirals of KitKats and two of Twirls, these being her champion sellers. Operators aim to paint a picture of abundance. “You don’t want the customer saying, och, there’s nothing to choose from,” Chambers said. At the same time, they can’t afford to fill their machines so generously that items expire before they are bought.
Vending machines do kill their human patrons every so often. A US study in 1998 recorded 37 deaths over a 20-year period, which amounted to an average of 1.85 kills per annum. This statistic, never formally updated since, sometimes prompts the claim that vending machines are deadlier than sharks. In the 1980s, cans of drink were left for the taking on top of vending machines near Hiroshima in Japan. These cans had been laced with a potent herbicide. Twelve people died and their killer was never caught.
If Wakefield is the literal birthplace of the automated sale, Japan is the spiritual home. There they vend fresh oysters, ice-cream, fancy dress, even tomatoes. In Nagasaki, there is a machine that sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms. Affection for vending is so pronounced that a machine selling something unique may become the subject of fascination, even pilgrimage. On that July day, while I was in Manchester with the Brodericks, a Japanese accountant named Masaharu Mizota, from Ehime, had recently learnt about an unusual – indeed, one-of-a-kind – machine in Uchiko, a small town on the Oda River, and he daydreamed about taking a roadtrip to try it. Mizota told me that he felt automated vending to be a part of his culture as a Japanese citizen. He was as willing to take a long journey to try out a novel machine as he would have been to visit a monument or a place of natural beauty. Mizota was eight hours ahead of me in the UK, almost ready to go to bed. Before he did so he checked his maps, figuring out a route for the morning.
The more time I spent with Johnny Brod, the more I saw how sincerely concerned he was for his fleet. He had a horror of unclean machines, and had been known to clamber onto his belly to peer under retrieval wells, recovering abandoned flip-flops. His machines were like his zoo animals, and he maintained them with fastidious care. He couldn’t let me leave Manchester, he said, without taking me to visit a prized specimen in Manchester’s Trafford Centre shopping mall. No gimmicks, just a boss dispenser in a prime location, capable of slurping in thousands of pounds a month. He drove us over in an SUV.
“There,” Johnny Brod whispered, signalling for us to halt on a concourse near a spotless, richly stocked machine. “Wait,” he muttered. He knew it wouldn’t take long. Soon a young shopper paused on her way through from clothes and jewellery. Water? Fanta Lemon? When she kept walking, I told Johnny Brod: tough luck. “Wait,” he repeated. And here she came, returning for water after all. Fanta, too.
“Vending machines in Japan sell fresh oysters, ice-cream, fancy dress. One in Nagasaki sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms”
The last time I spoke to Johnny Brod, in spring 2022, he was considering an expansion into London Heathrow, “where they still have the same shit machines you saw in Love Actually, 20 years ago. And you can print that.” But back on that July night, at 8.08pm, a swimmer in Glasgow bought an energy drink from a machine near a public pool. At 9.53pm, someone in Blackfriars bought a peppermint Aero. Soon all this UK trade would slow, purchases continuing in the US, resuming again in waking Asia. It was nearly midnight in the UK when I arrived back in London from my trip to Manchester. As I had made the day’s first vend, I thought it would be neat if I made the day’s last vend, too.
I wandered around St Pancras station, trying to find a machine to suit my appetite. After a day with the loquacious Johnny Brod, I was pleased by the knowledge that whatever machine I found, it would ask for no conversation. I checked the Google alerts on my phone, scrolling through social media, too, learning that a radio producer in Chicago had at that moment bought a sugar-dusted ganache from a machine in a garage off Interstate 55.
In Japan, it was morning. The accountant Masaharu Mizota woke earlier than usual and climbed on to his motorbike. He drove south, between mountains, crossing bridges, following a map mounted on his handlebars. He pulled into sleepy Uchiko at about 7.30am and parked by the one-of-a-kind vending machine he’d read about. It was selling pieces of fragile and beautiful origami. There were folded-paper sea creatures. Delicate flowers and birds. After his long journey, Mizota fed in a 50-yen piece, about 30p, and ran a gloved finger over the buttons, trying to choose.
A longer version of this article originally appeared in The Guardian © Guardian News & Media Ltd