I wouldn't dream about having one of these in your house, or finding one on craigslist, not going to happen unless your someone special with contacts high up in the Coke empire.
When I said-
Yeah, I don't think these will be showing up on craigslist anytime soon.
That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I don't think anyone here has serious delusions of ever owning one. Coca-Cola doesn't really even "sell" a Freestyle, even to an approved business owner.
Coca-Cola makes a delicious product. As a company however, they really doesn't want anybody owning any of their commercial (vending) products without their express consent. I remember somebody here saying it was official Coke policy to have old machines (pre-packaged vendors) destroyed when taken out of service. I strongly suspect the bottlers thought it simply wasn't worth their trouble or money to actually follow through.
Given their druthers, 99.9% of us wouldn't have so much as a Vendo 83, or a Dole Director. Perhaps they no longer care about people in general owning older machines because they have no worthwhile means of stopping it.
This new-fangled contraption however, is different.
This machine also reports sales and usage back to Atlanta via the internet and will also call the techies if it detects a problem.
I'm sure it reports GPS coordinates (and not TomTom or Garmin consumer grade, either), internal/external operating temperature, fall detection, tamper proofing and theft attempts (with alarm), the whole nine yards. I wouldn't rule out live video streaming. If this thing is moved just 6 inches from where Coca-Cola placed it, they're going to know about it, and the person who moved it better have either their permission or a dang good reason for doing it.
I bet it won't even function without express electronic authorization from Coca-Cola. Well, they might permit a short emergency cycle in case the receiver at Coca-Cola is down, but I can't imagine they would let it function indefinitely without some form of corporate validation. Heck, Microsoft tried to do that with the Xbox One, and it
is a consumer product.
Personally, I wouldn't want one anyway. It would be a major pain in the butt to keep working. Like other fountains, it deals with compressed CO2 at some point in delivery. Then there's the computer, running some proprietary OS that has no documentation available what so ever.
If you can get over the "unfairness" thing, there are actually very good reasons for a soda company to try to keep commercial products from being sold to consumers.
Could you imagine the headaches Coca-Cola would have from end-users complaining about things like they can't figure out why the machine is mixing lime and cherry into the Barq's root beer? Or that it is only dispensing plain water? Or that the touch screen won't work? The list goes on and on. If I were Coca-Cola, I certainly wouldn't want the hassle and potential catastrophes the could occur selling something like this to a home user.
