It reminds me of CafeX, which makes coffee. In the case of CafeX, it's mostly ostentatious. There is very little functional purpose for the arm, and that arm

It reminds me of CafeX, which makes coffee. In the case of CafeX, it's mostly ostentatious. There is very little functional purpose for the arm, and that arm is not cheap. When I went to try it in SF there was just one person in front of me, but there was a paid employee who apologized for the machine queueing drinks incorrectly which made it even slower than it already was. Basically instead of using one of the 2 coffee makers, it waited for the previous order to finish before making my drink. So from a functional perspective, at least in that instance, they made the coffee vending machine worse and roughly 10x as expensive, and then another 10x as expensive if you consider real estate. To be fair, the coffee was good, not great. In this case though, it looks like the arms actually serve an important function - shaking. I have no idea how well it works as I've never tried it. With regards to the unit economics of these things I don't know the details, but people often underestimate how expensive these are by as much as an order of magnitude.