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When a person asks for a drink from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, the dispenser probes the customer's taste sensors and pleasure receptors of the brain. Despite its sophisticated artificial intelligence, it always dispenses the same drink: a concoction that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea".
The SCC invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities ("GPP") which imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" are due to unresolved bugs in his software.
The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up the major landmasses on three planets. The (fictional) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes its marketing department as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes", and this may be prescient since evidence derived from a time warp suggests that this will indeed be the case.