“I like vending machines, because snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at the store, oftentimes I will drop it so that is achieves its maximum flavor potential.”

- Mitch Hedberg

During the evenings on the SMC campus, vending machines are like a mechanical oasis in the dark corridors. They emit their florescent glow, taunting us like a bug zapper on the brain dead fluttering gnats we’ve become on our mid class break from Calculus.

It’s this stupefied version of us, that makes us fail to realize our folly at the vending machine. A failure, that is, ironically, mathematical in nature.
Your snack does not equal it’s cost.

No, not literally. We all realize that the actual cost to produce that snicker bar is something like 45 cents, and we all happily pay 85 cents for the satisfaction. I’m talking about the value we project onto the raw cocoa, sugar, paper, and wrapping… AFTER we have paid 85 cents for it.

I noticed a behavioral pattern people made after, what I now call, the Mitch drop. Most people inserted $1 into the machine, for a snack whose cost is greater than 50 cents. In our case, 85 cents, therefore our change is 15 cents. You would figure our attitude at that point would be,

Oh boy oh boy, let me at my candy-bar!

Instead, the reaction is, and I counted 7 occurrences this evening…

I better grab my 15 cents now.

It’s as if we fear that some change jacker is going to strike at our 15 cents while we grab our snicker bar. We don’t bother rationalizing the other way around. Perhaps a snicker jacker could take our snickerage while we retrieve our precious 15 cents. I witnessed 7 people do this, so I tried to go against the grain as I was up to bat.

Grabbing the Snicker first felt about as right as petting a cat in the wrong direction. It’s not wrong, but it just ain’t right either… and you end up with a pissed off cat.

I like when you reach into the vending machine to grab your candy bar, that flaps goes up to block you from reaching up. That’s a good invention. Before that, it was hard times for the vending machine owners. “What candy bar are you getting?” “That one, and every one on the bottom row!

-Mitch Hedberg

So what’s happening? If we value our 15 cents more than the 85 cents we’ve just converted into chocolate wonder, then our chocolate wonder is now worth LESS than 15 cents. In realizing this, I instantly feel regret for paying 85 cents for something I wouldn’t even pay 15 cents for.

I mean, we’re talking over a 82% drop in value during the Mitch drop. Imagine buying a brand new car. How would you feel if you paid $25,000 for a car and as soon as your tires hit pavement, the car was now worth $4,500? And talk about depreciation, as soon as you drive your snickers off the lot, it doesn’t even exist in about 5 minutes. Or worse yet, you save it for later in your pocket, in the summer, and now you have a cleaning cost that brings the value of your Snicker to negative $3.50.

People. listen to me. Vending machine Snickers are a bad investment.

I realize this. I’ve known this all along. It’s only now that I’ve put this feeling into words. Yet every Tuesday and Thursday night, as I walk the halls on break, I see a soft wonderful fluorescent glow, emitting it’s lovely chocolaty siren song.

And I flutter to it.

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