As Tag:vending=movies - OpenStreetMap Wiki points out that these vending machines will likely end dead.
Has it happened? Would it be a good idea to mass delete them? move them to disused: prefix? Open some notes asking for resurvey?
See overpass turbo listing all movie vending
I expect and guess that maybe few were repurposed and are in use for something, but basically none still is in use as movie vending machine.
If my assumptions would be right, then I think that deleting all Redbox vending machines without extra tags such as note= would improve OSM.
As I recall, actually removing the machines has been a bit of a mess. There are places where they’re still present but non-functional.
Redbox! Now there’s a blast from the past. I remember seeing them all over suburban Orlando in 2009, but they were only in Canada for what seemed like a blink of an eye. Haven’t seen one in years. There’s one still mapped at the Walmart in Newmarket, Ontario; I have no doubt it hasn’t been there for a decade or more. 
(EDIT: I’ve added a note and fixme to that one. 
)
It appears from a cursory news search that the company went insolvent a couple years ago, and even before then many shops weren’t being paid commissions so they preemptively unplugged the machines and taped over the credit card readers.[1] According to this article, a company had been contracted to remove them all.
It’s probably pretty safe to assume they’re all gone, and can be deleted from the map.
Not a safe assumption. As of a couple hours ago, there was one present (but not functioning) at a gas station near me.
Same situation at a grocery store near me. Been sitting there disused or abandoned for years.
I pass by an abandoned Redbox regularly. Also a nonfunctioning Pacific Bell public telephone, for what it’s worth.
Personally I think that in this case it is better to remove object for defunct one that still is there abandoned, over having defunct one marked as an active one.
Though if someone has different opinion on data quality, they may disagree.
Mass-retag them as disused:amenity=vending_machine? I wouldn’t have advised that right after the bankruptcy, because a good number of machines were still operating to some extent as unnetworked zombies, but that was a long time ago by now. No big deal if we happen to have a removed vending machine as disused.
Is the disused lifecycle really going to help here? A disused shop is helpful in OSM because the location will return to use at some point, leaving the object in OSM helps with other details such as addresses. A disused vending machine isn’t likely be recommissioned in place, it isn’t likely that another company will place on in the exact same place and the process of someone adding a new one to OSM is likely to cause duplicates.
Assuming 50% have been removed and 50% are left in place but none functional, no matter what happens, it’s gonna be partly wrong. Deleting them all would at least mean this is done, otherwise they will be in the data forever.
What do we expect disused street furniture to do for anyone anyways? It’s just there, like the shell of a public telephone that has served as maybe a pedestrian landmark but nothing else for the past quarter century, or the newspaper box that’s a few pages away from the same fate. People do go around deleting lifecycle-prefixed features. We could call it abandoned if that makes the task sound more urgent.
I think it would be better to use the abandoned: livecycle prefix instead of deleting the vending machines right away. Otherwise you are likely to run into a similar issue we have in germany with public telephones: Someone might add them again, simply because they are still there OTG, and may look functional at first glance. The last paragraph in this post is a good example of a telepfone being addaed again, because its still there in recent (2025) Mapillary pictures.
yes:
abandoned: would be possibly more accurate?)I guess it depends on whether deleting nonfunctional machines is worse than keeping removed ones in OSM data.
Personally I think that both solutions are fine and better than waiting decades for cleanup and marking them as active in meanwhile
Okay, fair. Although there’s definitely no good reason to just leave them on the map without elaborating that they’re non-functional. This seems most reasonable:
A disused vending machine is still a landmark, particularly if it’s as large and visible as a Redbox one.
According to the RedBox subreddit, there are still a number of these that exist, and a very tiny number that are still plugged in and working.
as of which date?
I see at least 3 different users in there that have posted about finding working machines within the past 37 days. Working as in you can withdraw or return DVDs using a credit card (although it won’t actually charge you since their services are shut down).
I’ve seen one near me as well, although I never thought to check if it was actually still functional.