“Where can you find quality cuts of meat in the middle of the night in NYC?”
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That’s true of a grocery store’s refrigeration system as well.
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I’ve actually seen that movie; it was… different.
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I’m a fan of most of Barker’s work and read the original story more than once. I was curious about how well the adaptation would be handled, and I enjoyed the film for what it was. But I was expecting “different”. 
:
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To all you late night noshers in NYC:
Google this
“list of 24 hour grocery stores in New York City”
and about a dozen 24 hour markets will be identified.
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I remember the short story as being much better than the adaptation.
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IMO, there’s no way that a lot of his work could ever be adapted successfully. Not until they can beam it directly into your head, and books already kinda sorta do that.
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I agree; and that’s why I cringe with dread whenever I think about the fact that fucking Disney bought the screen rights to my fav series by Barker, Abarat.
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Say it ain’t so! 
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I really wish that I could, but alas; Disney wants to own everything.
I’d much rather see the project moulder on their shelves forever, than get made into an unfaithful version that will only disappoint me.
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Butchers are usually gone for the day mid-afternoon as far as i know. Maybe they’ll be there as late as 6 or 7pm, so if you need to have a specific cut and its not available you’re SOL. But then again this vending machine isn’t any different than the meat case at a grocery store. With the exception that it’s an over-elaborate non solution. Now if there was a machine that butchered meat on demand i’d be impressed but that’s not what this is.
most automats have nothing stopping people from leaving their own food in the slots before closing them back up…just sayin.
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Depends on how it’s managed.
I bought and ate fish musubi in a subway station in Japan, and the rice was super fresh and soft (despite refrigeration). They had a service guy that comes by super frequently to change stock.
Pending their attention to hygiene, this could be anywhere from “dodgy gas station tuna sandwich” to “japanese subway machine”.
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@pesco The link at the end of your post for “Your Next Steak Could Come From a Vending Machine” doesn’t seem to go there.
This seems to be it:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-22/applestone-meat-s-steak-vending-machine
It looks as though they have a small stand-alone building, open 24 hours, that just has their vending machines inside, and no sales staff. (As opposed to being machines installed within someone else’s 24/7 grocery store, which is what I had assumed at first, or on the outside of a building facing the outdoors as MrShiv’s photo (in post #19, above) of a meat-vending machine in Germany seems to show.)
Some photos:
An interesting line from the Bloomberg article:
Applestone notes that he’ll allow the meat to stay in the refrigerated case—six days for ground beef, seven for steak—in what could be considered a few days of extra aging time. No one has reported getting sick from the vending machine meat.
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I can’t wait for Amazon Meat Delivery Drones.
They can just use the same ones Skynet has.
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So I got sent to pick up meat for my family’s cookout on the 4th, so I have a bit of insider information. The store (at least the customer facing side of it) is just a room with an information desk type spot where there are people to walk you through the process, a wall of vending machines, and a table, with branded insulated bags hanging from hooks, on a take what you need then return them (or keep using them to buy meat) basis.
For the people who say “there are plenty of 24 hour places to buy food in NYC”, how many of you are willing to drive 3 hours for that 24 hour food? This is 3 hours from NYC (give or take, if you have a 3 am meat craving, there’s probably not a lot of traffic). Sometimes you just want to shop local, and there’s a lot of “local” that isn’t Manhattan.
As far as cleanliness, I guess I can only speak to the customer side of things (the small room with the machines and table), but it was scrupulously clean. I don’t say that lightly, if I needed an impromptu operating room for extreme surprise surgery, this is where I’d go.
There was a person working there when I went, she walked my Uncle, my Aunt and me through the whole situation, she was great. I didn’t think to ask for a tour of the butchery on the other side of the wall, nor a rundown of whether the meat is aged or not. I figure it’s fair to say that if you’re comfortable buying your meat from a butcher, you should be okay.
The machines have a rotating carousel of meat, and there are 4 of them. I forget how it was divvied up, but if you have separation requirements, the pork was its own machine, so no worries there. The attendant walked us through the whole process, which was something like rotate the meat until what you want is up front, try to open the door (which sets the price your card is charged), slide your card, then open the door for real and get your meat. My Uncle slyly managed to buy the ground beef before I ever got a chance to try to pay, but then I went and bought some sausages, testing whether apple pay works. Good news, if you’re out running and have only your watch to pay for things, you can in fact buy raw meat as a little pick-me-up.
So that brings us to the meat itself. We had purchased ground beef and some andouille sausages. I formed the beef into patties about 1/4 lb each, sprinkled a little salt on either side, and threw them on a grill, whose grates I had heated up to about “hot” then turned down to about “medium”, and cooked them to medium (about 140). I put the sausages on the cooler end of the grill to gently cook through without bursting the casings.
The burgers were fantastic, wonderfully juicy and flavorful. I purposely didn’t add anything to the burgers because I was curious “how good can vending machine ground beef really be?” The sausages were equally great. They were well spiced and you could definitely tell the spices were there to enhance the flavor of the meat, not cover it up. Seriously, this was good meat.
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Cool, it’s great to get a detailed first-person report! Very nice write-up, too (I’m not a writing expert or anything, but I’m admiring your skill to make it both informative and interesting). 
Summing up from various sources—it appears they’re widely thought to be the best butcher around, but they only sold wholesale, but because it’s so good people were clamoring to be able to buy their meat at the retail level, but they didn’t have the time/interest to open a full-service retail shop, so this is the way they figured out to best meet demand.
So yeah, it seems like getting over customer pre-conceptions about vending machines would be the main hurdle, but people-in-the-know about their meat will likely be very good customers.
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