Automated Restaurants And Stores Go Back To 1895
During the pandemic, hands-free humanless services became increasingly popular, with a few things like toll roads and even metro services going contactless and self-serve. Given the fact that people have been trying very hard to not die for the past two years, safe automated services have grown in popularity, with a few automatic restaurants even popping up here and there. But automated food service isn’t a particularly new concept; in fact, it’s over a century old.
Automats, or self-serving automated restaurants, had enjoyed great popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The concept is pretty simple: a grocery store or fast-food restaurant filled with vending machines containing things like hot meals or cigarettes. These were pretty much a precursor to the fast-food industry we see today, only without any annoying mascots or gaudy colors.
Basically, you could walk into an automat, pay the appropriate amount of coins, and get whatever item that machine is serving, which was often food and drink. The first automat in the world was Quisisana, established in Berlin in June 1895 and was a huge success, so much so that many more automats soon followed suit.