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?