Commerce

Credit card terminals in Japan are pretty similar to those in Canada — you can use tap (タッチ) or insert your card and enter your PIN to authorize the transaction. But there’s one twist that confused me at first. If you need to enter your PIN on a touchscreen, the numbers on the number pad are displayed in a random order!

I have no idea if this is unique to Japan or if it’s just new to me, but it does seem like a helpful security feature to ensure that your PIN can’t be guessed later based on the fingerprint smudges on the screen.

Most ice cream trucks in Canada and the United States use music boxes made by a single mom-and-pop company in Minneapolis. If there’s a particular ice cream truck song that annoys you all summer, you have the Nichols Electronics Company to blame.

(You could always ask the your local driver if they’re able to switch it up — if they have one of the Omni models, they could change it to one of thirty-one other songs.)

Historically, ice cream truck music boxes were a sonic callback to late 19th-century ice cream parlors and soda fountains, which had coin-operated music boxes before phonographs were invented and jukeboxes could become a thing.

Baskin-Robbins famously sells 31 flavours of ice cream at a time. But because a standard freezer holds an even number of buckets, they actually display 32 slots and have one flavour appear twice.

(They might also use it for a vegan version of a flavour, which isn’t an exact duplicate but isn’t counted as a distinct flavour either.)