“There’s nothing wrong with the vending machine,” he said, expressing frustration with the need to buy an expensive new unit compatible with the new notes.
All over Japan, restaurants, cafeterias, bathhouses and other businesses are facing a similar prospect. The country has 4.1 million vending machines, according to Nikkei Compass, a database for industry reports. Many of them will be obsolete once the new 1,000-, 5,000- and 10,000-yen bills roll out in July featuring hologram technology.
In Japan, where the work force is shrinking, the machines reduce the need for cashiers and servers. Among the most reliant on the machines are ramen shops, which serve one of the Japanese working class’s favorite, most affordable meals. (...)
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, students from a nearby university filed in for a late lunch at Mr. Nishitani’s nine-seat shop, Goumen Maruko.
He and his three employees sell about 100 dishes a day. Each is priced under 1,000 yen, or roughly $6.50. The most popular dish is a $5 Jiro-style bowl: noodles with a mountain of vegetables and clumps of pork fat soaked in a steaming broth of pork and chicken. The most expensive meals, which come in larger portions, cost about $6.20.
To defray the cost of upgrading or replacing vending machines, some municipalities offer subsidies, but most of the cost will fall on shop owners. A new machine can cost two million yen, or about $13,000, said Masahiro Kawamura, a sales manager at Elcom, a Tokyo company that sells vending machines that dispense tickets.
Yoshihiro Serizawa, who runs a soba shop in Tokyo, said he spent about $19,000 on his new machine, which also accepts cashless payment — “a huge financial burden.” The amount is equivalent to more than 6,000 orders of his most popular dish: soba with mixed vegetables and seafood tempura, which costs just over $3. (...)
Among ramen chefs, the widely accepted limit for a bowl of ramen is known as the “1,000-yen wall.”
“I really don’t want to raise the price any further,” Mr. Nishitani said.
When Japan released its last set of bills in 2004, modifying the vending machines and issuing 10 billion new bank notes cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Demand was so high that one manufacturer near Osaka, called Glory, saw its net income triple, according to an annual report.
Transitioning to new machines could take years.
by Kiuko Notoya and John Yoon, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Noriko Hayashi
[ed. Vending machine culture in Japan is so unique. For a detailed explanation of why (and what it takes to run an industry like this - leasing; placement; restocking; repairs for heating, chilling, mixing components, etc.), see this fascinating essay: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world (Guardian):]
[ed. Vending machine culture in Japan is so unique. For a detailed explanation of why (and what it takes to run an industry like this - leasing; placement; restocking; repairs for heating, chilling, mixing components, etc.), see this fascinating essay: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world (Guardian):]
***
"He led us into a control room that had large screens mounted on the walls and employees arranged Nasa-style, facing 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 activity, north to Aberdeen, south to the Isle of Wight. A couple of quick clicks on a technician’s computer and we were marvelling at the snacking history of a loyal, I would say fanatical, Broderick customer in Manchester, someone who must have been sourcing two full meals a day from behind glass. While 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 and there it was. (...)Every vending machine is a battleground. Profits are ruthlessly haggled over. Competition for spots is intense. Broadly speaking, the vending game is built on deals between operators (who own machines and have the skills to install them, fix them, constantly fill them with fats and sugars) and site owners (who have the rights to advantageous pieces of land). Either a machine is placed on private property – say, a factory, 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, inside a teeming airport, for instance. Here the site owner will expect a cut of each item sold, anywhere from 10% to 30%. (...)
If Wakefield is the literal birthplace of the automated sale, Japan is the spiritual home. There they vend umbrellas, ice-cream, fancy dress. In Nagasaki, there is a machine that sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms. You can vend fresh tomatoes in Kobe and, in Tatsuno, fresh oysters. In Osaka, during the summer of 2021, a Japanese airline had started selling tickets to mystery destinations from a machine that asked 5,000 yen, or £30, per turn. This concept was so popular that 10,000 tickets were sold by the end of 2021 and the airline put duplicate machines in Tokyo, Nagoya and Fukuoka.
At the last formal count, conducted by a trade body in December 2020, there were 2.7m vending machines spread around Japan: one for every 46 citizens, the highest density anywhere. Affection for vending is so pronounced that a machine selling something unique may become the subject of fascination, even pilgrimage."
