Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
THEY sell umbrellas, flowers, fruit and cooked meals, cough up cool drinks and even try to read your mind: vending machines.
The automated stores are about to become as ubiquitous as traffic lights and globally offer an ever-widening, dizzying palette of goods.
Japan alone has more than 2.5 million vending machines that sell just beverages - about one machine for every 50 people.
These vending machines generated a staggering $27 billion in profit last year, and companies in the Gulf States are now looking to capitalise on the growing trend here.
In the competitive vending machine market, providers are competing ever more fiercely to be noticed above the machines' neon-glare and the clatter of change with novel new offerings.
One provider certainly turned heads when it set up a banana vending machine in June, selling chilled bananas for $1.5 each.
"You can buy bananas at cold stores and supermarkets, but people seem to find it fun to buy them from a vending machine," a spokesman said. "People think it's fun to watch, fun to buy and fun to eat."
Some machines now provide added social functions, such as news flashes and sports results on electronic display boards.
The very latest in high-tech vending machines even attempts to make the consumer's choice for them using a camera and software that recognises a person's sex and 10-year age band with about 75 per cent accuracy.
Using the point-of-sale data, one machine may look at a person and suggest a sports drink or a chilled can of espresso based on its accumulated marketing wisdom.
Payments can be made with swipe cards and even mobile phones as well as cash.
