In the 1st century AD, the device for selling holy water made by the Greeks, Hero, was the earliest vending machine in the world. In 1925, the United States developed vending machines for selling cigarettes, followed by various modern vending machines for selling stamps and tickets. The types, structures, and functions of modern vending machines vary depending on the items being sold, mainly including candy, beverages, newspapers, and other vending machines. A typical vending machine consists of a coin device, an indicator device, a storage and sales device, and so on. The coin device is the core of a vending machine, and its main function is to confirm the authenticity of the coins input, sort the types of coins, and calculate the amount.


Since the 1970s, various new types of vending machines controlled by microcomputers and larger scale unmanned vending systems that use credit cards instead of coins and are connected to computers have emerged, such as unmanned shopping malls, automatic ticketing and checking systems at stations, and cash automatic payment machines at banks.
Vending machines are a new form of commercial retail that developed in Japan and Europe and America in the 1970s. It is also known as a 24-hour mini supermarket. In Japan, 70% of canned beverages are sold through vending machines. The world-renowned beverage company Coca Cola has 500000 vending machines worldwide.
Across Japan, there are a total of 5.5 million vending machines (according to 1998 statistics), with sales reaching 689.69 billion yen and 48.87 million yen, ranking first in the world. Operate on the display screen of the vending machine, input the commodity number and purchase quantity, and put in the coin, the commodity will come out of the pickup port, and even hot noodles and rice balls can be bought from the food vending machine. Although the total number of vending machines in Japan is lower than that in the United States (6.89 million according to 1997 statistics), it is the highest in the world in terms of population share. The United States has an average of 35 people owning one vending machine, while Japan has 23 people owning one vending machine.
In the 17th century, small bars in England had vending machines for cigarettes. In the long history of vending machines, Japan developed practical vending machines after entering this century. The first vending machine in Japan was the Stamp and Postcard vending machine, which was introduced in 1904. It was a machine that integrated the sale of stamp and postcards with the delivery of letters into a mailbox. The true popularization of vending machines occurred after World War II.
In the 1950s, "water jet juice vending machines" became very popular, and juice was poured into paper cups for sale. Later, due to the entry of American beverage giants into the Japanese market, a revolution emerged in the circulation field dominated by vending machines in 1962. In 1967, all currencies below 100 yen were converted into coins, which promoted the development of the vending machine industry.