cheap thrills: where did all the twenty-five-cent machines go?

Earlier this spring, my husband and I made the approximate one-mile trek to Dave & Andy’s, a beloved ice cream shop that opened near the University of Pittsburgh in 1983 and was closing permanently in just a few short days. While I do love ice cream (and theirs was quite good), a double scoop was only a secondary goal. I was really after one last shot at their twenty-five-cent machines.

Years before, I had gotten this tiny blue velvet-covered doe from one of those machines. It came, of course, in a small plastic capsule with a yellow lid. It wasn’t perfect—I remember some kind of hot glue-like substance crusted onto one corner of its restful face—but it was something you might call darling, a rare quality to emerge from one of those machines. I carried it around in a purse for awhile and then, taking it out of its capsule, I carried it around in my jacket pocket and then, as you’ve suspected all along, I lost it.

When we arrived, a line was starting to wrap around the block, something I should have anticipated and didn’t. I probably could have scooched by, reassuring everyone that I was headed to the corner with my coin purse of quarters, but what if someone halfway back didn’t see me jingling change, couldn’t tell that I was pointing at the junk toys by the door, and started, like, booing or something? We walked home, doe-less.

There was a time when you’d find these machines (known in the industry as bulk vending machines) in just about every grocery store, pizza shop, or drugstore, usually in the vestibule, maybe by the baskets and carts. Places where parents would linger just long enough for their children to get out the words, “CAN I HAVE A QUARTER?”

I can think of only a handful of locations in the area (besides the now-closed Dave & Andy’s) that have a bank of bulk vending machines. One is another ice cream shop called Scoops. Another is a small Turkish grocery store called Sultan Bey. There’s one near the Randyland gift shop, although last time I was there, the dial was jammed. There’s a gumball machine in the S W Randall Toyes and Giftes in Squirrel Hill.   

According to a now-defunct Wikipedia source, bulk vending machines make up less than 1% of the total vending machine industry. Prior to writing this, it hadn’t really occurred to me that gumball and novelty toy machines were in the same family as the machines that sell Bugles and Cherry Coke, but they share a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather: a holy water dispenser made in first-century AD Alexandria.

Trying to piece together how we got from Ancient Egypt to today isn’t as easy as you might think. In fact, just about every account starts with this holy water dispenser story and jumps to 1888, when Thomas Adams Gum Co. started using bulk vending machines to sell Tutti Frutti gum on subway platforms. This was followed by Pulver Manufacturing Co.’s 1897 release of vending machines that featured “animated figures,” which seem to be small, mechanized figurines that moved when you pulled the gum or chocolate-dispensing lever. (Take a peep at this one from 1899 or these later models from the 1920s.)

Also unclear is when these machines started to sell toys. Candy-coated gumballs hit the scene in 1907. In 1909, a company called Northwestern Novelty Co. distributed bulk vending machines that sold a penny matchstick called the Yankee. According to a European website called PlanetGames, bulk vendors probably started using their machines to sell toys somewhere between 1907 (hello, gumball era) and 1930, transitioning from wooden toys to plastic and metal toys in the 1950s.

It’s not at all surprising to me that these machines started popping up in cities during that transition between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Not at all unfamiliar today, this was a time in American history when wealth gaps were widening and the tycoons profiting off of low-wage labor started looking for ways to appease the masses and prevent any sort of working-class uprising. This era gave birth to dime novels, movie theaters, and amusement parks, so why not bulk vending machines? A little snack or trinket for a penny? That’s practically a luxury, and even you, child working on an assembly line, can afford it. Life sure is swell!

Anyway, how did we get to the world of sticky hands and rubber bugs and hologram stickers that plagued parents and delighted children in the 80s, 90s, and early aughts? Again, not totally sure, but it may have had something to do with a man named Roger C. Folz.

Roger C. Folz is one of those American legends whose backstory gets a little muddied. With no college degree under his belt, he left a dead-end job on Wall Street and decided to build a business from the ground up. That business was Folz Vending, founded in 1949, a time when bulk vending was apparently Hot Stuff. One report says he started with a single machine while another says he started with fifteen. Either way, he used them to sell pistachios, and he sold a few more per nickel than his competitors. This, Folz has said, was the secret to his success—offering real bang for your buck (or rather, your coins).

By all accounts, Folz would go on to stuff his machines with toys in capsules, bouncy balls—the works. Folz Vending became the largest bulk vending corporation in the country. If you dabbled in twenty-five and fifty-cent novelties sometime before the early 2000s, there’s a good chance that you gave those quarters to Roger C. Folz (who was, by all accounts, a good dude).

In 2003, Folz Vending merged with another bulk vending giant, American Coin Merchandizing. The following year, both companies were swallowed up by Coinstar—yes, that Coinstar, the one that counts all your change and gives it back in cash, minus about 12% of the total value. Personally, I’d rather have the rubber bugs.

Some of the issues facing bulk vendors in the twenty-first century are fairly obvious. We’ve been transitioning into a largely cashless society. Bulk vending machines take quarters, not bills, making it difficult to keep up with inflation—asking for a $1 bill in exchange for a mediocre toy is one thing, but it somehow seems egregious to ask for a dollar (or more) in quarters. I’d venture to guess that even the rise of the gig economy in the last decade or so means fewer families are picking up their own groceries or their own pizzas, and their app-based delivery drivers probably aren’t thinking, “You know what I could really go for right now? A temporary tattoo of a sugar skull.”

As it turns out, the bulk vending industry has faced challenges all along, many of them with the US government. Enter the National Bulk Vendors Association, founded in 1950 and still active today.

On the NBVA history page, you’ll find a long list of lobbying efforts, starting with my favorite, and the one that led to the NBVA’s founding in the first place: the fight against gambling excise taxes. According to the US Treasury Department, paying a nickel for something like a gumball and not knowing which gumball you were going to get constituted gambling, and the bulk vendors responsible for this nefarious activity needed to pay up. The NBVA secured a winning ruling on this front, pointing out that their customers may be playing a game of chance, but any prize was more or less of equal value. Still, bulk vendors would have to keep fighting this fight at the state level for years to come.

It seems that twenty years after Coinstar ate our biggest bulk vender, there’s really only anecdotal evidence of the state of the bulk vending industry.

On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Frank Parisi. Parisi is a sort of bulk vending pioneer, developing a machine that takes credit cards while still offering customers the old-fashioned dial-cranking experience. Parisi also got into the crane machine business, with clients like Staten Island’s minor league baseball team. He seems to be doing pretty well, but that’s to be expected—the Parisis were close family friends with Roger Folz, who gifted Frank’s parents with a bulk vending machine the day he was born. Nepo baby alert!!! (Kidding—mostly.)

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Bradley Ellison, aka Sugarman, the subject of this VICE short documentary. Sugarman’s bulk vending company, Sugar Daddies, struck gold in 2004 with a line of toys called Homies. Ten years later, he’s roving around NYC, collecting $20 worth of quarters here, $30 worth of quarters there.

“I’m makin no moneys, that’s what’s goin on,” he says, screwing the lid back onto a machine in a pizza parlor. “There was a time…when this machine…forget about it… We’d do a killin. Unbelievable. It’s like takin money out of a dead man’s pocket over here.”

Of his years of success, he later goes on to say, “By the time I finished paying off all  the money I borrowed, the business had tanked.”

Closer to home, I can’t seem to find any vending companies that do bulk vending. It’s all soda and candy and chips and stuff. The closest mention to behind-the-scenes bulk vending I came across was this listing for a candy route that came with 42 “placed” machines and an additional 26 in storage. According to the original owner, the placed machines brought in about $1,375 per month total. Not enough to live off of, but enough to pad your pockets, assuming you have the time to go and collect your quarters and refill your machines, which the owner estimated to take about 18 hours a month.

The industry might be struggling, but the players behind it aren’t giving up. The NBVA still holds an annual conference (collocated with Amusement Expo International and the Laser Tag Convention), where industry professionals and hopefuls share the latest trends and merchandizing tips. They teach classes on fixing the machines when they break. They give out scholarship money to members or the children of members. They stoke interest in the Dollar Coin Initiative, a push to replace the $1 bill with a $1 coin. They name the year’s award winners in categories like Best Original Design and Best Licensed Design because, that’s right, there’s an entire manufacturing element that we haven’t even touched on.

I don’t exactly have an agenda, here. In fact, I’ve been avoiding this thing for two days straight thinking that a neat and tidy conclusion would come to me with space, and it hasn’t. Before doing this research, I was already on the hunt for twenty-five-cent machines, and that won’t change now. I like them. I like the strange, tiny toys that come out of them, toys that are often near-useless, toys that you really couldn’t find anywhere else. You might not, and that’s fine. There is, without a doubt, too much junk in this world to begin with. (I’ve already had long conversations with myself about how if this industry were to make a true comeback, they’d need to reckon with their plastic-and-rubber footprint, but that’s a topic that would require several NBVA panels to cover.)

If I’m suggesting anything, it’s this: when you see a bank of bulk vending machines, at least stop and look at the display boards tucked behind the front glass panel. Find the machine that would have grabbed your attention when you were a kid. Pat your pockets in search of quarters. At worst, the machine will eat your change or you’ll get the prize you least wanted, but hey baby, that’s all part of the thrill!