College Gets America's First Pizza ATM, What Took So Long

Finally, America can have instant pizza

Everyone loves pizza. Especially college students. In fact, just about the only thing wrong with pizza is that there isn’t some in my hand right now. But if you head over to the America’s first “pizza ATM” you can solve that problem in about three minutes.

That’s right, apparently some super stoned (is there another kind?) college students at Ohio’s Xavier University have a convection oven rigged up to a touch screen that will allow them to order steaming hot pizza the same way we request cash. Call it an ATMmmm…

According to Time, the machine will pop out a hot 12-inch pie 24/7 for nine bucks. Whoever made this thing is pretty ambitious, if about 20 years too late (I graduated college in 1998). But sometimes all it takes is proper motivation, and until the pizza machine arrived, the only option Xavier students had was Domino’s. More like DomiNOWAY amirite?

Turns out the Pizza ATM is a French invention. Pardon? That’s right, the French have had this bad boy for thirteen years already. I can’t believe it took thirteen years for it to make it stateside, but who cares? This is the best gift they’ve given us since the Statue of Liberty.

Just ask the students. ““It is the best pizza I’ve ever had, and I hate to admit that as a New Yorker,” Jennifer Paiotti, marketing director of XU’s auxiliary services, told WCPO Cincinnati.

First of all, Jennifer should be ashamed. I haven’t had the pleasure just yet, but I’m sorry. I don’t care that it’s 3am and most everyone ordering from this thing is three sheets to the wind, there’s no chance pizza from a convection oven is better than a fresh pie from some of my favorite places in Brooklyn or back in New Haven where I grew up. But I remember college. Everything I ate at 3am was the best thing I’d ever eaten.

Second of all, for some reason this thing only holds 70 pizzas at a time. That seems about one zero short to me. Like I said, I remember college.

I’m happy for these kids. Not only do they have their entire futures ahead of them, not only are they experiencing the hedonistic joys of being away from home for the first time, they are also the lucky participants of the country’s first-ever automated pizza dispenser. As if I needed another reason to envy college students.

Thank god for their eventual crushing student loan debt to even the playing field.