In Michigan, we have a 10¢ deposit on cans and bottles. They’re refunded by feeding empties into a machine that counts them up. But there are never enough machines, so a line forms. And right now I’m watching 7 dopes inspect each container individually before feeding it into the machine.
These machines used to require you to put the barcode into the right position. Maybe they’re still used to those machines and therefore look for the barcode on each container?
Possibly. I remember those, they would take the can in, then spin them so the lasers could find the barcode. These new machines don’t do that. I’ve fed the cans in with the barcode against the belt, and the machine can still tell what they are.
Well, even before those, there were machines which wouldn’t spin the can. It would just conveyor-belt it under the sensor, not find a barcode and then conveyor-belt it back out, until you turned it the right way around…