Old School Quarter On A String Vending Hack

If you happened to grow up in the 1980’s when the arcade machine business was really booming. At some point or another you probably tried to hack a vending machine. Now that I run several vending machines and see what kids do to try and get free product or money I must show a little sympathy.

The funny thing is kids think the vending operator won’t find out. Or really funny thing is the fact that they think the hack will work. We would spend hours as kids running around new home construction sites looking for the round metal pieces punched out of the electrical boxes to use as slugs.
We would have pockets full of these slugs and after all that time searching for them we were ready to ride our bikes to the 7-Eleven to play Street Fighter. Low and behold we would pump a slug in the machine and it would just fall out of the return slot.

We wasted our whole day. It really served as right. We didn’t stop there. We heard from a friend’s older brother that we could tie a string onto a quarter. With all the time spent trying to pull one over on this vending machine we could have made plenty of money mowing lawns or something.
We went home and got a real quarter. Then we drilled a small hole in the side of the quarter and then tied a thread onto it.

We went back to the Street Fighter game at the 7-Eleven and dropped the quarter in the coin slot and pulled the string thinking we could pull it back out. We ended up breaking the string trying to pull the quarter back up.
This was a horrible failure. As the case with other people that try to get something for nothing out of our vending machines.