In their latest episode of Fool’s Gold in Zone 5300, Milan Hulsing and Frits Jonker ask their readers: was this for real? Was there ever a store in Amsterdam in the sixties where you could buy records using an outdoors vending machine? (The Dutch name of this device: grammofoonplatenautomaat. There.)

These types of vending machines are quite popular in the Netherlands, but are used almost exclusively to sell unhealthy snack food—note how inconveniently sized the compartments in the photo are for 45s, but how well they would fit a greasy meatball! I’ve also seen one such machine used by a fishing supply store, but there it made eminently sense; fishers get up at ungodly hours, so having a machine to sell them maggots and worms is better than having to get up early yourself. But did the vinyl vending machine ever exist? Perhaps it was there for bad cases of the “you have to have heard this song, man!” jones.

Answers to Fool’s Gold, P.O. Box 75459, 1070 AL Amsterdam, The Netherlands.