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We have one of them again in the Bay Area, which just opened. http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-living/ci_28753177/eatsa-san-francisco-automat-restaurant-anti

• jandrese 11y ago
  I wonder how much inflation hurt their business model? Obviously you don't want people dropping in 100 nickles for a sandwich in 2015, and even quarters are unwieldy. I guess today it would just have magstripe readers on every door and you would swipe your card? They could even collate all of the transactions in a day or so and charge your card only once. That said, labor is so cheap that it's hard to imagine how you could come out ahead with a system like this. Maintenance costs are probably going to be higher than just hiring a minimum wage disaffected teenager to do the job instead.
  • theoh 11y ago
    Magstripe and even traditional chip-and-pin is being rapidly replaced by contactless payment (in the UK, for example). It would be quite convenient to use contactless for each item you were getting in the Automat, but there are downsides, like the reams of small transactions on your statement, which are less easy to check and control than the old situation where 5 or 10 transactions a day would be typical.