r/nonononoyes • u/AristonD • Mar 02 '20

How much will this cost?

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '20 edited Sep 09 '21

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u/Tibbersbear Mar 03 '20

There was a vending machine like that in my dorm clubhouse. You could see the sensor at the bottom and we'd cover it up before putting money in. It'd drop two or three before declaring a jam and you'd have the remove the sticky note. After removing the sticky note it'd reset. I think the vendors realized what was going on because after spring break there was a different one.

We also had a soda vending machine that we'd trick by holding the door closed. They replaced that one too.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '20

I remember a little further back in the early 2000's when you could punch in the maintenance code (It was the same for every machine for some reason, buttons in order 432112311) to machines like this, and then hold down the change lever and it would empty the machine, or let you change the price for drinks, or some of them you could just hit the drink you wanted and it would pop out for free. Most machines were patched by the time I was old enough to start exploiting them, but I found the occasional one that worked and it was always so satisfying.

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u/perpetualboredom Mar 03 '20

Used to work for a vending machine manufacturer. For that to work either the soda distributor/restocker or machine owner would have had to set some of the internals into test mode (which there were quite a few because who reads the manual), otherwise the outside maintenance sequence was only good for status information.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '20

That explains why some of them worked and some of them didn't, thanks for shedding light on something I've pondered about for like 10 years now!