(Vending Machines of Amsterdam & one in Germany for luck)
Amsterdam is the ultimate cycling city yet visitors are actively discouraged from casual participation, but when it comes to vending, they’ve got something special up their sleeve that (as far as I know) Venice can’t touch with a rèmo.
That’s right, we’ve saved the best until first, although prices have skyrocketed in recent years (no 1-euro bargains nowadays) Febo is the original automat style hot food vending chain that you can find all over the city and beyond. In most (but not all) locations drinks and frites are served by a human type person, but everything else requires a card and a flap.
The frites were fine, sadly the rest of it was a bit ‘grey meat in crumb’, the things we do for you lot eh?
By the way, anyone hoping to dub off the card number will find less than 3 euros on there, soz!
There were no vintage machines spotted but here’s a fantastic picture of a Dutch machine at the German Automatics Museum which had been removed by the time we visited – and yes we will be writing this up comprehensively later.
It looks like it works with 3 columns, and each coin allows the slider to push the bottom of all three columns to the left with one cheese dropping out each travel of the lever. Thanks to the website that hosted this originally.
Feeling a bit of heartburn after your chunk of cheese? Hope not, but if you need some Rennies, why not pop along to the robo-pharmacy in the wall? It does indeed look like somewhere Robocop would shop, and after all, Paul Verhoeven is from the Netherlands?
This one was at the central train station, where there’s also a Febo rival, Smullers, though they appear to be a travel concession for railways and airports only.
And from the station [Smooth! Ed.] we took the train to Lübbecke to spend a day at the Deutsches Automatenmuseum, which is going to be the subject of a later write-up. Changing trains on the way, we stumbled across this ‘old’ cigarette machine on the German side.
It looked simultaneously not in use but as if the important bits did seem to be looked after, and the prices seemed fairly 2026 too! But surely in most European countries (and UK for many years) machine sales of tobacco were banned due to the lack of ID ability? Well, mostly yes, Portugal being somewhere that just carried on using standard machine without ID checks. But the Germans had a solution, look carefully and you can see a national ID card reader to the left of the buttons.
It was a short trip but I still managed to buy a KitKat from each country! See you again soon for Machines of Hungary and our writeup from the museum!