Hey lets go back to vending machines. I am sure that they were invented long before my childhood, but they were around sparsely then. When you found them, they were really cool things. Remember we talked about the soda machine? The one for a nickel.
Well lets count some of the others. Besides soda, there were these candy machines. Candy was stacked in layers so when you put in your nickel or dime, you had a knob to pull out. It would release the candy and fall. There were an abundance of cigarette machines. Kind of the same principle. There was a pay phone.
This cool device originally had a non metal cord, with a handset attached. They were always black, had on the top of them three coin slots, for quarters dimes and nickels. These were extraordinarily cool. Reason being was no one had invented making or giving change back yet, so you always had to put in the exact coin. Not just money, but coin.
A nickel soda machine would only take a nickel and when they changed the price, they had to re-engineer the machine to take a dime. Of course this wasn’t a very big deal yet, because inflation was around, but just barely.
That really accelerated after 1963 or so. That was when they invented coins that were not silver or nickel or copper. A quarter was a lot of money, because it was twenty five cents worth of silver.
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