This is The Guardian.

A minute before midnight on the 21st of July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester Airport, I stood ringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner, Broderick, and positioned like a clever trap between arrivals and the taxi-rack.

Standard agonies, sweet or savoury, liquid or something to munch.

I opted for Doritos, keying in a three-digit code and touching my card to the reader so that the packet moved jerkily forwards, propelled by a churning plastic spiral, and tipped into the well of the machine.

My Doritos landed with a swap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast because there hasn't been a mechanical miscue.

Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK's first vending machine sale of the day.

Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Withernshore, drinking coffee with John, Johnny Broderick, the man who owned and operated that handsome airport machine.

I'd had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines, these weird conspicuous objects. With their backs against the wall of everyday existence, they tempt out such a peculiar range of emotions from relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee.

For decades, I'd been a steady and unquestioning patron.

I figured that by spending some time in the closer company of the machines and their keepers by immersing myself in their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the bottom of their enduring appeal.

What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made generations of us buy?

Johnny Broderick seemed a good first person to ask.

Freckletan, portly and quick to laugh, Broderick has a playful exterior that conceals the fiery heart of a vending fundamentalist.

He is among so invested in the roboticised transmission of snacks that come Halloween, Johnny Broder has been known to park a machine full of sweets in his driveway, letting any costume local kids issue their demand for treats via prodded forefinger.

With his brother Peter and his father John Cena, he runs the vending empire Broderick's limited. It's 2,800 machines occupying some of the most sought after corridors and crannies of the UK.

The Broderick family sugars and sustains office workers, factory workers, students, gym goers, shoppers and school children.

They pep up break times in a nuclear power station. If you've ever wolfed a post-partum snickers in the maternity ward at Chesterfield or Leeds General or turned firstly while waiting to fly out of stand-stead or Birmingham airports, then you've almost certainly shopped at one mechanical remove with Johnny Broderick. He thanks you.

The coffee we drank that morning had trickled into cardboard cups from one of his own hot beverage makers.

Business had been hurt badly by Covid, he said. There had been one wretched day in the spring of 2020 when he awoke to find himself not the owner of the second largest fleet of vending machines in the UK, but instead of time bombs.

All these machines of ours in places we couldn't access, all full of perishable food.

After enduring months of closed workplaces, abandoned airports and dead campuses, the Broderick had lost millions on foregone twills and mini-chedders.

Even so, Johnny Broderick was bullish, insisting that the pandemic presented him with opportunities too.

...