10 Weirdest Vending Machines Around the World

Somewhere in a parking lot in Chiyoda ward, a dented machine with a half-dead fluorescent tube is keeping a can of stewed daikon hot enough to sting your fingers. No staff. No sign. It has been doing this for years, patiently, for anybody with four coins and a taste for the unexplained, which is a fair description of the world’s vending stock once you look past the candy bars.

So we went hunting for the machines that shove the format somewhere it was never designed to go. Live animals. Gold bullion. Cars, real ones, stacked eight stories up behind glass. Everything below is documented by credible reporting, and where we could confirm whether the thing still runs, we say so. Without further ado.

1. Hot canned oden, Akihabara

Cross Mansei Bridge, walk five minutes from JR Akihabara Station, and you reach a small parking lot at 2-19-7 Kanda Sudacho that regulars call the mysterious vending machine corner. There is no signage. The machines look like they were retired from somewhere respectable and never told. One dispenses oden in a hot aluminum can for around 400 yen, which buys you daikon, a boiled egg, konjac and fishcake sitting in dashi broth at four in the morning. Another sells canned ramen, noodles and pork slices included, in a vessel roughly the size of a tall beer. A third has carried canned yakitori originally developed for disaster stockpiles, with a shelf life measured in years.

Why it’s weird: hot wet food in a can is a category most of the planet quietly voted against.

2. Dashi broth with a whole flying fish in the bottle

Dashi Douraku machines sell 500ml plastic bottles of cooking stock, and each bottle contains a whole grilled flying fish, visible, staring out at you through the plastic. The standard bottle runs 700 yen. The premium version adds sodabushi, dried bullet mackerel, and costs 750 yen. The brand started around Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, then reached Tokyo, where machines went into Mitsui parking lots in Shinbashi, Meguro and Roppongi. The fish is in there for flavor, so resist getting ambitious with a fork.

3. Fresh eggs at the farm gate

Drive through rural Kyushu or Chiba and you will pass unstaffed egg huts, coin-locked, humming away outside chicken farms. Packs of six or ten typically run 200 to 500 yen. Farmers restock several times a day, which is the whole point, because the eggs reach the pickup hatch faster than any supermarket could manage them. Many operators skip refrigeration entirely and run an air conditioner through summer.

4. Edible insects, sold with a completely straight face

In November 2018, Toshiyuki Tomoda put an insect snack machine outside his balloon shop in Kumamoto. It sold out repeatedly. A cricket protein bar went for 700 yen, a bag of salted crickets for 1,300 yen, and a tin of tarantula for 1,900 yen. Similar machines have since turned up in Osaka, at Nakano Broadway in Tokyo, and at a Nagano campsite stocking some 18 kinds of deep-fried insect. Higher in protein, at least, than anything in our tour of Temu’s worst products.

5. Live hairy crabs in the Nanjing subway

In 2010, Twin Lakes Crab Company of Gaochun county, Jiangsu, installed a machine in a Nanjing subway station and loaded it with living hairy crabs, boxed individually and chilled to 5C so they sat dormant rather than furious. Prices ran 15 to 50 yuan by size. The bottom shelf held ginger vinegar, because the company had thought this through. If your crab arrived dead, the promise was three live ones free. Early reports had it shifting around 100 crabs a day.

Credible coverage of the machine dried up after that first season, so treat this one as a period piece rather than a lunch plan.

6. Gold bullion, repriced while you decide

On May 12, 2010, the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi unveiled Gold to Go, a gold-plated cabinet that dispensed 24-carat bars from 1g up to 250g and refreshed its prices every ten minutes against the live market. It sold out within a day. Copies followed at Town Center mall in Boca Raton, which repriced every 90 seconds, and at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. The Abu Dhabi original was gone by 2016. The idea outlived that hardware, because Goldsikka opened India’s first gold-dispensing ATM in Hyderabad on December 3, 2022, selling 999-purity coins from half a gram to 100g in tamper-proof packs, and installed a second at Ameerpet metro station a year later.

7. Used cars, from an eight-story glass tower

Carvana’s towers are the largest vending machines on this list by a comical margin. You buy the car online. You turn up. A staff member hands you an oversized branded coin, you drop it in the slot, and a steel and glass structure eight stories tall lowers your vehicle down through the middle of itself. A standard tower holds around 27 cars. There are more than 30 of them across the United States, with Texas hosting the most.

8. A random antiquarian book, chosen by a machine

The Biblio-Mat has stood inside The Monkey’s Paw, a Toronto oddity of a bookshop, since November 2012. Artist Craig Small built it. Drop in a coin and a microprocessor picks blindly from one of three vertical stacks, an antique telephone bell rings, and some obsolete hardcover drops into the tray. You get what you get. The price started at $2 and rose to $5 in 2022. Small’s line about it has been quoted ever since, that you do not choose the book, the universe chooses it for you. Jack White liked the idea enough that Third Man Records built its own version, the Literarium, for the London shop.

9. Original art from a retired cigarette machine

Clark Whittington installed the first Art-o-mat at a North Carolina art show in June 1997, selling his own black and white photographs for a dollar a pull. Every machine is a converted cigarette vendor, pulled out of service as those disappeared from bars and diners, and every artwork is sized to fit a cigarette pack. There are over 200 active machines now and roughly 300 contributing artists across five countries. Pieces typically go for about $5, which makes a signed original cheaper than most of the junk in our rundown of the dumbest things on Amazon.

10. A pizza mixed from flour and water in under three minutes

The Let’s Pizza machine does the whole job in front of you through an observation window. It mixes dough from flour and water for each order. It flattens it, doses the tomato sauce, adds your chosen toppings, bakes the thing at high heat and drops it into a cardboard box in under three minutes. A full hopper is good for roughly 100 pizzas before somebody has to restock it. A prototype was running by 2003, the European rollout started in 2009, and the machines reached South Korea in 2015 and Japan in 2018. They are still sold to operators today.

Belgium answered with the Robo, a 750-pound machine that cooks a portion of fries in roughly 95 seconds, in beef fat, as any Belgian would insist. Mayonnaise optional. Beef fat mandatory.