How do vending machines and other money counters (especially older models) differentiate between what coins/bills are put in?
In: Economics
Obviously not all machines work the same. But some coin machines operate based on weight. I worked at a carwash for my first job, and setting the coin box up was quite easy. You basically opened it up, press a button and put through 5-7 different coins of the same value. You use different coins so it gets an average weight. We had it set up for $1 and $2 coins (I’m Canadian) as well as two different tokens that gave the same time as $1 and $2 coins. Tokens got used for internal use as well as for people who paid for carwashes with a credit card.
In this case, each coin is assigned a time. Like quarters would be 30 seconds, and dollar coins would be two minutes. It was so possible to make quarters give more time than loonies. Other machines would assign a value to each coin (like 25 cents for a quarter) instead of a time like I did in the car wash.
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