Pepsi Vending Machine Thinks You’ll Be More Popular If You Can Hand Out Drinks To Pals

Pepsi knows you’ve been struggling to convince your friends that you care about them after selfishly taking the last wing during last week’s game of whichever sport you were watching. And if you happen to live within visiting distance of five malls in the U.S. you’ll be able to not only play a game on a vending machine to win a free drink, but you can then send a code to your pal and surprise him or her with a soda.

Vending machines are changing from the days when you simply begged your coworker for that extra nickel you need to get a well-timed sugar rush to get you over the 3 p.m. workday hump. It’s all about social media now — if you can’t interact with your vending machine and get it involved in your friendship, what’s the point of it being there?

In the video below (via Mashable) Pepsi walks potential vending machine users through the process of either winning a soda for yourself (after buying one, it seems) or sending a code to a friend who can pick said gift up at their leisure.

The only malls so far to have one of the machines are in malls in Columbia, S.C.; Happy Valley, Ore.; Savannah, Ga.; Eau Claire, Wisc.; and Lancaster, Pa. Coca-Cola also is working on a program that gifts drinks at four machines around the world: New York; Buenos Aires; Cape Town and Mountain View, Calif.

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