An Amazon pickup location at the University of California, Berkeley. Thomson Reuters For its latest service offering, Amazon is reinventing the vending machine.

Called Amazon Instant Pickup, the new service will allow customers to pick up items within minutes of ordering them, according to Reuters. That's faster than the hours that Amazon Prime Now requires — and much faster than traditional shipping options.

Customers order from the Amazon app and use a barcode to access their purchase, which can include snacks, drinks, and essentials like phone chargers. An Amazon employee fills the Instant Pickup locker within minutes of the order.

The service is designed for impulse, need-it-now purchases, and it uses Amazon locations already in operation for traditional pickups on college campuses.

Think of Instant Pickup like a large vending machine with a staff of one. An Amazon representative told Reuters that some items could be cheaper if you chose to buy them with Instant Pickup rather than selecting traditional shipping, but they did not go into more detail on specific pricing.

Instant Pickup gives Amazon yet another foothold in the physical world, which it is increasingly looking to occupy after announcing in June that it would purchase Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

Instant Pickup is already available in five locations, including the University of California at Berkeley and UCLA. Amazon says it will expand the service to its 22 college campus locations by the end of this year. Like most new Amazon services, it's for Prime customers only.