Most Americans still work in an office. The old cliché about the “9 to 5” holds true, as those are the most common hours to clock in and clock out, with a pause around noon for lunch. If you don’t work a typical schedule, then there’s a good chance you work in an industry like food service, as waiters and cooks are often on the clock well into the evening and night hours.
While restaurant workers have to deal with odder hours, they also get free or discounted food pretty much anytime they want. Your typical white collar office worker doesn’t have that luxury. That makes office vending machines even more important. Your place of business also has more vending machine options than you realize. Here are a few of them.
Snack machines
These are the kind of machines we all know about. If you’ve ever been in an office, you’ve seen a break room (or sometimes a small closet area) with a standard vending machine. These machines often hold mostly processed foods.
When you put in a dollar (or slightly more), you get to choose between things like crackers, chips, sugary fruit pies, and sometimes even chewing gum. If you want to be healthy, it’s not impossible, but it’s also not easy. You usually have to settle for something like pretzels, and even those can be high in sodium.
The biggest advantage of these machines is that they’re relatively cheap to install. The items in the machines also have a long shelf life. In some cases, you might see the same bag of chips in December that you saw in January. In that case, you should really check the expiration date.
Water and ice machines
An ice vending machine is one of the best kind of machines you can have in your break room. For one thing, people like to get ice with their cold drinks. It goes great with soda, juice, and of course, water. Speaking of water, many ice machines also dispense filtered water. If your employees use a filtered water pitcher at home, then they’d no doubt appreciate getting a similar quality of water when they’re office.
If you’re hesitating because you think it sounds like a lot of work, rest easy. Ice and water machines are much more reliable than they were back in the old days. If you’re at a restaurant and the ice dispenser gets jammed up, that’s frustrating. It’s also a sign of an ice machine that’s either old or poorly maintained, if not both. Springing for a new ice and water machine will keep your employees hydrated without serving as a constant source of aggravation.
Office work doesn’t have a reputation for being strenuous. You’re probably not running around the office performing sprints at regular intervals. That said, about 60 percent of your body’s weight consists of water. Breathing, sweating, and urinating cause us to lose water. You may not need ten glasses of water a day, but you do probably need more than you’re getting right now.
Soda machines
Soda machines are a staple of office life and corporate culture. You’ll find them in car repair shops and hospitals alike. If you’re attending an industry convention, then there’s no doubt that the conference center has soda machines scattered throughout the premises.
But the ubiquity of soda machines doesn’t make them a healthy option. Sure, soda has a nice, fizzy taste, but too much soda can hurt your body. The caffeine can make it hard to sleep, and drinking lots of soda can also mean frequent bathroom breaks. If you drink soda at work every day, try to cut back to a single soda every other day. Once you start down the path of drinking less soda, you may eventually decide to cut it out of your diet completely.