Hot drinks vending machine

I’m currently in Kyoto and was very disappointed to mind that the drinks I bought from a vending machine were only luke warm. I remember they were much hotter in the past. Is there a reason for this?

I also had a luke-warm drink the other day. Makes me wonder whether the vending machine companies got sued for causing burns to some irresponsible consumers, and now they lowered the temperature for the "safety of customers". The entire country is being terrorized for various "saftey" reasons these days.

Middle of winter also. Outside machines might be struggling to keep the heat up

Sorry, Judith. Right after opening the thread it made me laugh for a while, because just a few days ago, just the same thing happened to me, and I felt just the same way as you! Vending machines sometimes don't offer drinks at the expected temperature, and that makes us irritated.

Possible reasons (Don't take these all too seriously):

1. Because of technical issues, vending machines take time to make drinks hot or cold enough, especially in mid-winter or mid-summer. A staff might have set cans and bottles into the machine just before you bought one, so your drink couldn't get hot enough as you had expected.

2. Due to eco-friendly reasons or something similar, they may set the temperature setting of vending machines less hot than they used to be. By the way, attempting to reduce energy consumption is a pretty good thing, but instead they reproduce our frustration for not getting hotter drinks.

3. As Uji implied, there were troublesome and annoying complainers, and they cried out to the vending machine industry: "I hate hot drinks from vending machines! They burned me! Cancel them!!"

My usual go-to machine at Shinjuku station was ok for me a few days ago (handy to grab as I get off the train), but on Tuesday up in Nagano my coffee was pretty tepid. Was the -5C morning a contributing factor? Not sure.
I will probably get a coffee from a machine sometime this morning here in Kyoto, but an interesting thought that the drinks companies might have lowered the temps. Of course, you can always get a hot can of coffee from a conbini and check the temperature before buying.

Just a word of advice: If you're drinking coffee or any other kinds of processed drinks from a vending machine, you shouldn't really have your hopes high to have a quality drink, lol. If anything, I'd just go to a coffee shop if you want some higher quality and quite frankly (Better for you) drinks. Plus, you can socialize.

When I lived in Japan in the past, I always found that drinking the coffee or other drinks from vending machines made me feel very bad, probably from all of the processed stuff inside of them.

To the OP, if it's been a while since you were last in Japan, you may indeed be noticing a difference in temperature. I feel like vending machine hot drink temperatures were noticeably reduced during the electricity conservation campaigns following the 2011 earthquake/tsunami, and never really went back up.

At the same time, many convenience stores have expanded their selection of hot drinks poured into a cup at time of purchase (coffee, matcha latte, etc.). These are still piping hot, and it could be that consumers who want a very hot drink have migrated to those instead, reducing demand for very hot vending machine drinks. Come to think of it, the vending machines that pour the hot drink into a paper cup after you pay for it are still very hot, but those machines are less common than the ones that sell hated cans/bottles.

On the subject of drinking vending machines "always" making a person "feel very bad," I'd wager that has much more to do with that individual person's digestive system than the quality of the drinks themselves. Given the absolutely massive number of vending machines in Japan, and how frequently people purchase and consume drinks from them, if vending machine drinks were inherently harmful it would be an epidemic-level social phenomenon.