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Markets in everything, vending machines edition
John de Palma has much to offer today:
An entrepreneur who used his redundancy money to start a business selling foldable shoes from a vending machine is to launch in America. Matt Horan's £5 Rollasole is an emergency flat shoe women can change into from their stiletto heels for the walk home after a night out. The pumps are already on sale in Ibiza superclubs Eden and Space(...)
Link here. No, innovation is not dead:
...Katie Shea, a senior at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is instead pursuing her dreams of entrepreneurship. She has founded a shoe company that designs and imports collapsible shoes that women can wear while walking to work and then stuff into their pocketbooks..."
But where is the vending machine? Scrub that one. I want something different from my vending machines:
...Over the last decade, Mr. Torghele, 56, an entrepreneur in this northern Italian city who first made money selling pasta in California, has developed a vending machine that cooks pizza. The machine does not just slip a frozen pizza into a microwave. It actually whips up flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping hot pizza in about three minutes...
Here are previous MR posts on vending machines. Here is my favorite.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 1, 2009 at 05:54 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I wonder at what minimum wage/heath care insurance requirement it becomes cheaper to use capital as a complete substitute for labor (clearly in Japan they've already reached that but space is an important factor there as well).
Posted by: nelsonal at Jul 1, 2009 9:17:27 AM
interesting that nobody pointed to the lack of high denomination coins as a problem in the US.
Posted by: babar at Jul 1, 2009 10:23:26 AM
Babar -- Soda machines have no trouble accepting bills, and for anything greater than a couple dollars, you could swipe a credit card. I'm as likely to have three $1 bills on me as a European is to have three 1-euro coins.
Posted by: Josh at Jul 1, 2009 12:41:45 PM
The rollasole should work in New York. Plenty of women would prefer to have a shoe like that on the subway.
Posted by: techreseller at Jul 6, 2009 2:14:23 PM
