Hacker Cinema
The Automat
2021 · Film · documentary · 79 min
Directed by Lisa Hurwitz
The 100-year story of the iconic restaurant chain Horn & Hardart, the inspiration for Starbucks, where generations of Americans ate and drank coffee together at communal tables. From the perspective of former customers, we watch a business climb to its peak success and then grapple with fast food in a forever changed America.
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5 comments on Hacker News
If you can't get enough of Mel Brooks I'll also recommend the 2022 documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automat
Highly recommend the 2021 documentary "The Automat" if you're into this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automat
The automat is something of a strange echo from my childhood.
When I was maybe 5 or so, my mom took my sister and I to Chicago from Kansas City. That train ride in and of itself is something of time capsule in my memory. My sister remembered the glowing handrails (radium?). I remember the lounge car where passengers sipped cocktails and watched the lights at night rush past outside. The women dressing, in my fuzzy recollection, like extras in The Thin Man.
Chicago was where I got to buy a pie, or some kind of dessert, from an automat. What a magical thing to give a kid some coins and just tell them to go grab what they like…
There are a number of things from my childhood that I came to find later were just gone. (Or obscure now to the point they are essentially gone.) Imagine my delight when the film Dark City featured an automat.
I was surprised in Tokyo to find something of a hybrid. Those places where you place your order, pay through something like a vending machine at the entrance of the place. The order goes back to the kitchen and, after you've sat down and waited a short time, your order is up.
Struck me as an efficient way to not have to have someone running a cash register, seating you, taking your order.
Also, there's a documentary called "The Automat" [1] that I tracked down just recently—have not yet watched. (Looks like it's streaming on Amazon, FWIW.)
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4554690/
The term automat refers to a model of food distribution. [0] The movie [1] is about a specific firm, Horn & Hardart [2]. I don't think I'd agree with a thesis that suburbs were the direct cause of H&H's automat chain's decline. Logistically, there is a balance of preparation, freshness and transaction latency. The automat inverted freshness and transaction to prep latency from trad restaurants. The arrival of "fast food" used standardization to decrease prep and transaction latency from trad restaurant levels while maintaining freshness levels. In terms of payment tech, I'm not able to find a reference but my recollection is that automated bill accepting technology not common until the 1980s. If automats were unable to accept bills then they would be unable to offer higher value meals without human intervention (and lose their transaction latency advantage). [3]
The format was threatened by the arrival of fast food, served over the counter and with more payment flexibility than traditional automats. . . . Another contributing factor to their demise was the inflation of the 1970s, increasing food prices which made the use of coins increasingly inconvenient in a time before bill acceptors commonly appeared on vending equipment.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automat
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_detector
Edit: removed first sentence "It's like a failure of imagination is cyclical." which had to do with H&H and other's ability to pivot, which H&H did in spades.
HBO Max has a documentary about the Automat, which was once America's largest chain restaurant. You could put in coins and receive food from small automated doors and spigots at the Automat. Its downfall came with expansion of the suburbs, as there were fewer people remaining in the city center after work. The present crisis of city centers is similar. I'm not sure if the relevance of city centers has basically been downhill since the first half of the 20th century, or if this phenomenon is cyclical. Give it a watch.