Vending Machine For Live Food

China has built a vending machine which dispenses real living crabs in a little plastic container at 30% less rate than usual.

One of the first vending machines was built by Hero of Alexandria, an engineer and mathematician. His machine works by accepting coins and dispensing holy water but later vending machines are used for dispensing canned food, beverages, monetary change etc. You may have heard of a vending machine which dispenses bananas in Japan but the guys in china came up with apparently more bizarre idea. They have built a vending machine which dispenses live crabs in a plastic container and they claim that the crabs are absolutely fresh. The science behind this odd vending machine is that the temperature inside the vending machine was kept at 5 degrees Celsius.

The temperature knocks the Shanghai hairy crabs in hibernation so that when the machine doles out a crab it wakes up from hibernation because of the change in temperature. The crab from the vending machine costs 30% less than the usual price because of the reduction in the cost of shop personnel. One of the sign on these vending machines indicates that if the crab is dead on arrival, we’ll give you three free crabs. The price ranges from 1.5 dollars to 7 dollars depending upon the size of the crab. This weird idea was headed by Shi Tuanjie Shi from the Twin Lakes Crab Co. and they are considering trying their machines in Japan too. These vending machines have been inaugurated at several underground stations in Nanjing and the company claims that they are selling hundreds of crabs by the day.

[Source: DAILYMAIL, GIZMODO]