As a child, no trip to a grocery store was complete without a coin spent on a gumball machine, usually near the exit. The same was true for visits to the mall or cinema or any other place where the machines could be found.
There were two types of machines: those that vended lollies, and those that gave toys. Usually the lollies – almost always gum – only cost 5 or 10 cents. Toys cost more – up to 50 cents! – and we’re usually either ‘super balls’ or a motley collection of plastic trash.
As far as the lollies were concerned, I always preferred the standard gumball, and would often spend the coin mum or dad have me on one. Sometimes a machine would sell a (child’s) handful of tiny gum pieces, and since these seemed to be better value for money I could never resist them. As I grew older the gumballs became more exotic – some even had fizzy crystals inside – and I occasionally bought them all the way up until I left Oz.
As mentioned the toys were usually dreadful: cheap tchotchkes from China that would have cost the machine owner considerably less than 20c apiece! But as a kid I hardly cared, and one type of toy in particular I loved: the tiny rubber car. These were about an inch long, molded from hard unpainted rubber, and usually quite detailed for their size. If ever I saw a machine that sold these I always had to get one, and as a young boy I had a small, prized collection of them. Coming home from grocery shopping was always more fun with a tiny rubber car in my pocket!
Recently I’ve been paying attention to the gumball machines in our local shops, and all the photos in this blog were taken these past weeks. There are fewer machines than there used to be – Covid killed many it seems – but they’re remarkably similar to the ones I recall from my youth. The stock of machines is remarkably similar to what I remember from my youth, and still contains mostly gumballs, super balls and disposable ‘toys’.
The above was the closest I could find to the rubber cars of my youth. These are about the same size, seem to be made of similar material (or perhaps a flexible plastic) but as you can see are painted now, which gives them an extra dash of sophistication. At $0.75, I couldn’t resist buying one…
I reckon I would have loved this tiny rocket as a kid. It’s probably the ‘worst’ in the machine, but it’s also the one that my young imagination could have easily thought of as an alien spaceship. For me, that would have been enough 🙂
You used to see the smaller machines on pub counters with peanuts in them. Sometimes still do.