I saw this at FB. It's a vending machine selling Chinese cast coins in Chongqing, China at some tourist trap. Don't let this give you any ideas...
At one point in my childhood or teens, so late 80s or 90s, Walmart used to have a have a game in it's entrance where you could win Franklin halves and the like!
Man, I love Google Translate! Government permission, exclusive sale of cultural relics. Professional appraisal, genuine goods at a reasonable price. Historical relics, legal collection. Learn from the past and understand the present, inherit culture. Increase knowledge and accumulate wealth. Tourism, culture and creativity, connecting friends from all over the world. And, at the very bottom right of the second photo, Be careful
Sometime around 1970 my family went to the beach, and there was a store with a bubble-gum type vending machine that had COINS in the capsules. Some capsules had $1 or maybe even $2 bills. I think it was a quarter a play, maybe fifty cents. I got my first New Orleans coin from that machine, a damaged 1892-O dime. I was even more hooked from then on.
Holy smokes! Thanks for sharing that. Of course someone in the U.S. had already thought of something this YEARS ago. Okay, now I've got ideas...
I remember the weeks long vacations with the parents in the 60's and 70's. Stopped in some little towns and the motel cafes had those machines in the entryway. I poured quarters in them whenever I saw them and got indian cents, buffalo nickels and merc dimes (most G-VF) and sometimes a near slick standing lib qtr.
I bought an entire album from this machine at the local supermarket in my mother in law’s neighborhood in St. Petersburg. I haven’t been there since 2019 and am not sure if it’s still there.
Wasn't a vending machine but as a child I once found a crane game with collectable coins in plastic boxes. I didn't know much about coins back then and spent a few dollars at it until I managed to win a bicentennial quarter.
I always wanted to get a bubblegum-style vending machine with capsules and stock it with World coins. I’d include a little printed sheet that identified each coin. And there would be plenty of older coins in the mix. Maybe even the occasional small silver piece. I did find such a machine on one trip somewhere. I think it cost 50 cents. For my two quarters, I got a very modern Brazilian coin (loose inside the capsule) worth about 10 cents, with no identifying paper. Not my best investment, but it was fun. And I could do so much better with something like that. I could provide my buyers with plenty of bang for the buck (for their quarters, that is), and probably still find a way to make a modest profit out of it. (If you don’t count the labor involved. Prepping the coins would be time consuming. But fun.)
If you know Chinese ancients, it isn't too hard to believe that these are all legit. They're common pieces, though. There are so many thousands of extant Chinese cast coins around. When you make a lot of coins for thousands of years, you get a lot of coins laying around!
Yep. I could stock a vending machine with my own dupes that would make it absolutely worth the 50, 75 cents or a dollar you'd spend on it.
Yes, I agree, it would be fun to own such a machine. And cheaper ancient (or just older) cash coins would be a cool product. Looks like they’re well packaged and presented in the pic in the OP.
I saw one of those gum vending machines at a roadside stop up in Maggie Valley not long ago. I got excited as a teenager and went up to the young fellow running the register to ask him to swap my bills for quarters for the machine…. The fellow looked down and shook his head and says to me…. I’ll never understand why people spend fifty cents to get a couple of old nickels…. I laughed my kazoo off.
This thread really got me to brainstorming. I wouldn’t be ready to drop $5K or whatever on one of those tall snack-style machines, but the smaller acorn-capsule machines aren’t bad. One big question is where I’d set it up, though. It would need to be in one of the touristy areas with a lot of family and kid traffic. And one wonders what kind of cut of the proceeds the property owner would expect.
Well, some research will need to be done. I would imagine that a vending machine of the tall-snack kind would have to do. However, there ARE vintage vending machines:
