I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing.

The show where we searched the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Make up, jewelry, caviar, even blue jeans.

Depending on where you live, you can buy just about anything from a vending machine.

Whether you drop in a few quarters or tap your cell phone on a scanner, impulse buys a weight

in our world of endless convenience.

And the vending machines of the 21st century are marketed on their ability to individualize,

to tailor-make your own product, your own soda, or pizza, or coffee, perfectly made for you and your social

media feed. In a world where you can custom make a concoction from 125 flavors of Coke freestyle,

there's something downright charming about a vending machine from the 1970s or 1980s. It's boxy square design,

maybe some wood paneling or some dinged up metal siding. There would be big scratched buttons

offering four or five or maybe six flavors, often without an option to insert dollars, so you'd put in two quarters

and you might get a new Coke or a tab or even a wild cherry Pepsi, ice cold. In Seattle, Washington,

there was such a machine, not unique in its age, but perhaps in its circumstances.

Since at least the mid-1990s, a lone soda machine had stood on East John Street in the

Capitol Hill neighborhood.

It sat on the edge of a sidewalk, backed up against the ramp to a business called Broadway

locksmith, and edged on either side by a thin strip of grass.

It seems that the soda machine sat there as grunge blossomed in Seattle and threw the turn of a new century.

In each decade, it offered ice-cold cans of soda in an unlikely spot, $8 bills and accumulated graffiti that was occasionally wiped clean.

It was a vending machine.

Nothing worth writing a dozen or so articles about.

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