This is The Guardian.

Hello, my name is Claire Longrick. I'm Deputy Editor of The Guardian Longread.

This August, every week, we're bringing you some of our favourite Longreads of the year

with a short introduction from one of the editors. I've chosen an article called

A Day in the Life of Almost Every Vending Machine in the World by Tom LeMont. Tom is one of our

regular writers on the Longread and he's written on quite an eclectic range of subjects, pubs

and oil rigs and police car chases. When he came to us a couple of years ago with the idea of

writing about vending machines, we knew it would be really fun, but also that it would take

quite a bit of work to find the right way into the story. It's one of those stories that we think

covers kind of how we live now, type of peace. It's a sort of window into our habits and attitudes

that hopefully with a lot of carefully chosen examples reveals something about our greater culture.

Once you've got a wonderful subject like vending machines, which obviously

it appealed to him because of his notion of them in his life. He talked about the vending machines

in his school and how they sometimes seem to punctuate one's life. For example, there was a vending

machine just outside the Labour ward where his wife was giving birth to their first child

and he would go out there between bouts of crisis to refresh himself. So that machine took on a

sort of a comforting personality almost. Tom is very good at finding good characters and he

found some brilliant people who owned the machines or who could talk about the business side and there

is obviously a strong business narrative here. And it's one of those things where a very familiar

object gets given the long-read treatment in the sense that you find out so many things about this

apparently familiar object that you didn't know. So how often they get filled, what the charges are,

what the security issues are, the fraudsters that try and steal from them and the competition

...