People in the 1800s really didn’t like waiters. Though they were still a novelty, waiters sprung up with the rise of the restaurant earlier that century and had come to be regarded as a burden to service. In fact, in the United States they were assailed for their unpleasantness. In 1885, a New York Times editorial claimed that restaurant servers were “one of the necessary evils of an advanced civilization.” That was because waiters at that time were annoying, hovering over customers, watching their every movement. By 1896, waiters had become so toxic that entrepreneurs went to great lengths to develop “waiterless” systems. That’s when German engineer Max Sielaff, the inventor of the vending machine, teamed up with a candy company to open the first waiterless restaurant: the Automat. The way Automats worked was simple. The walls inside each store were lined with a series of small windows, each of which contained an item of food. Customers inserted a coin, and the window unlocked, allowing them to pull out a meal. There were no waiters, no tips, and the food came fast. The success of Sielaff’s Automat drew the attention of Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, a business duo in Philadelphia that opened America’s first Automat. It became an immediate sensation, and by 1912, they expanded to New York City. During World War II, New York City added an additional 15 Automats, and Philadelphia had over 80 locations serving 350,000 customers a day. By the middle of the 20th century, the wave of anti-waiter hysteria had dissipated and Automats were losing their popularity to other fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s. The last Automat closed in 1991.
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| Behind the scenes of an Automat |
