Return of the Vending Machine Monster

Throughout the 2021-22 school year both students and staff fought continuously with vending machines in the NUHS lower commons. Machines had been eating buyers’ money, were empty for days on end and refused to dispense food and drinks correctly. This caused confusion and uproar all throughout the school and everybody wants to know: Has this continued into the 2022-23 school year?

When the new school year began everyone assumed the vending machines would still be empty or broken from the previous year. Students were not holding out hope for working machines during lunch or before and after school with the machines’ past reputation. To everybody’s surprise, the machines were fully stocked and working correctly.

“We would get asked to open the machines a couple of times a week,” Jodi Goff said when asked about the machines in the past. Office workers had to open the machines in order to retrieve stuck snacks or eaten money for students. Not only was this inconvenient for staff like Goff but also for students trying to retrieve a quick snack at lunch or between classes.

“The school was running it and a lot of different people were messing with it. We fixed a few different things over the summer and now it works just fine,” Michael Mehlhop said. Mike, one of NUHS’s custodians currently runs and maintains the school’s vending machine out of his son and his business “The Candyman”. This makes it easier for the machines to be filled and fixed with ease.

While machines are currently at least partially stocked the majority of the time and functioning correctly they continue to empty quickly and nobody knows how long they will continue to work properly. Only time will tell.