On October 2, 2017 the Supreme Court denied the plaintiff’s petition for certiorari in McGee v. Coca Cola Refreshments U.S.A., Inc., letting stand the decision by the 5th Circuit holding that Coca Cola vending machine was not a “place of public accommodation” covered by Title III of the ADA.* Last month a District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania applied the same reasoning to a DVD rental kiosk. Nguyen v. New Release DVD, LLC, CV 16-6296, 2017 WL 4864995 (E.D. Pa. Oct. 27, 2017). Neither McGee nor Nguyen mention an earlier case, Jancik v. Redbox Automated Retail, LLC, 2014 WL 1920751 (C.D. Cal. May 14, 2014) that also attacked automated machines allowing DVD rentals. Interestingly enough, in Jancik v Redbox the defendants conceded that their DVD rental kiosks were places of public accommodation subject to Title III of the ADA. It apparently never occurred to them that the difference between a public accommodation and a mere “service” was whether the goods were delivered by a machine instead of a human. Were they wrong? These cases illustrate a real problem with the way “public accommodation” is defined in  Title III. More