The weekend is here (finally) time to leave the political stuff on the curb and cleanse the mind of all the fecal matter….thanx to the media……
Remember the old days when you tried to use a pay phone and someone had busted it up to get the change? Or how about the snack or cigarette machines that had been burglarized….times change…..now we get to see videos of people trying to make off with an ATM machine….using trucks, chains, back hoes, etc…..everybody looking for that next score…….what possibly be next? Maybe those new DVD machines in every corner? What possibly lure criminals out to try a new heist?
Well, I found it in an article in the UK’s Guardian………
Tucked away in an unassuming corner of the Westfield shopping centre in west London are a trio of vending machines. One dispenses cash, another soft drinks and water, but the final – and latest – one offers a much more expensive commodity: 24-carat gold. It’s not exactly an impulse buy, is it?
The Gold to go machine is manufactured and operated by German company, Ex Oriente Lux (light from the east). They’ve already taken their gold-vending ATMs across the world, with machines in Europe, North America, and the Emirates. The idea is simple: take the world’s reliance on the idea of gold as a solid investment and then give them quick and easy access to it. It’s so simple, in fact, you wonder why no one else has done it before. The machine updates its prices every 10 minutes, based on current gold spot prices.
On offer are bars of different weights: 1g, 2.5g (with the distinctive London skyline engraved on its back) 5g, and a quarter of an ounce coin. For the flashier punter, there’s a 250g bar, which costs in the region of £10,000. Hussein selects a 2.5g bar about half the length of his forefinger and pays £100 in cash. A couple of seconds later, a matt black gift box emerges from the machine. Inside it, the thin bar is sealed in plastic with an anti-counterfeit hologram sticker.
I think this is a dumb idea……at $1400+ an ounce…..I cannot wait to see the imagination that will be used to rip off one of these machines……or the poor bastard that gets his gold out of the machine……
Leave it to the Germans to come up with the technological engineering to make such a machine; only to have it totally mis-used. Wunder (gold) Bar.
Morning all…Hansi….I would have thought it would have been the Japanese……
For the husband that forgets their anniversary each year until the last minute, no need to rush down to the supermarket and get day old flowers as an afterthought. Gold neatly wrapped from a vending machine will come across so much more sincere.
Larry, I had always thought that there should be a screw up chart in the supermarket flower section…..you know 6 roses for a blunder in speech or 12 for a sorry I am such a dick or ….well you get the drift……but you are right…next I guess it will be a diamond machine for the real big screw ups…..
That doesn’t look like a very good exchange rate to me, but then the figures are in grams, ounces Pounds Sterling and USD, so I could have screwed up the conversions 😆
Other than that, it looks like a good idea – gold will ALWAYS be better than dollars OR pounds and the Euro’s a joke, so there is some sense to it…
In fact, I don’t know why countries dropped the “gold standard” at all… could it be so that it would be less obvious when they were busy printing imaginary money?
Quin, you final point is the most accurate…..but this gives criminals just another place to find a victim….that is my only bitch…..
Well… it keeps them of the streets I suppose… oh, no, it probably doesn’t. Oh, well… 😆