An “Automat” was a style of restaurant that was basically a great big vending machine. A wall, or part of one, was covered in little cubbyholes with locked doors; behind each door was a piece of food that the customer could see and pay for. Feed in your coins, the door would pop open and you’d get your sandwich or apple or slice of pie or whatever. Door closes, and the guy working on the *other* side of the wall puts a new one in the cubbyhole. Used to be real popular, but they faded away a couple generations ago.
They seem to be making a comeback, and it’s really not surprising. The video below is an interview with the owner of an Automat franchise; economics is driving this, as three employees can service 250 customers a day, where a regular restaurant would require six. And of course as the minimum wage continues to be driven higher and automation continues to be driven cheaper, soon enough the production of those individual food items will be automated and the cubbyholes will be filled by a robotic arm.
There is another aspect that makes the automat format attractive: this separates the staff almost entirely from the customers… which makes them harder to rob. Additionally, other than the individual cubbyhole doors and things like windows and furniture, violent morons have little to reach that they could destroy. BLM or Antifa rioters come by to smash up the joint? No cash registers or computers or stoves or anything else to reach, so long as the staff doors are secure. The food-doors would be small and mass produced in vast numbers; they would likely be both cheap and durable… and stocked in large numbers in a few boxes in the back. A Mostly Peaceful Protest sweeps by, you’re closed for a day while the staff swaps out doors, and then you’re back in business. There are those customers who are provoked to violence not because of politics, but because they are crazy or stupid; they order the wrong thing, or their order is screwed up, and they lose their minds and started screaming and flailing. With an automat, they see what they’re going to get before they pay. So long as the mechanisms work, there *should* be reduced incentive for violence. Of course, some people are just going to go buggo anyway, but here humans are largely removed from the other side if the equation.
So long as we’re bringing back things from the Depression era, can we swap out Brutalist architecture for Art Deco?
4 responses to “Return of the Automat”
The Netherlands has a chain of these called FEBO, I visited one in Amsterdam years ago. It wasn’t very good, I suspected its main customer base was people who’d just come out of one of their ‘special’ cafes…
Th 1920s-30s Chicago architecture was gorgeous as if out of a Fritz lang vision
Gilded deco ceilings, real wood panel adorned elevators with bronze railings
Commie architecture is just so ducking offensively bland like concrete salad bowl dwellings
Agreed. That was one of the great things about “The 5th Element,” New York City of the 23rd century was shown not to have the typical swoopy, bland towers of sci-fi, but vast Lang-eqcue art deco skyscrapers and bridges.
That said, I *am* somewhat in favor of brutalist architecture: government bureaucracies should be in such. The IRS, ATF, etc. should be in such buildings, with dreary interiors to match. Not a speck of color or joy or hope to be found. This will incentive not only the public but the employees and functionaries to *leave.*
When my daughter was an exchange student at the University of Essex in England, the residence halls were in the brutalist style, and were named for great socialists in history. Good choice for soul-crushing architecture.