The Automat (2021)

Alec Shuldiner: Self - Automat Historian

Quotes 

• Self - Automat Historian : When you thought of the Automat, you thought of New York, and vice versa.

• Self - Co-Author, 'The Automat' : What is in effect, the first Horn & Hardart cafeteria, was not really efficient. Fortunately, Horn & Hardart had a chief engineer named John Fritsche.

  Self - Automat Historian : Fritsche developed a lot of patents related to the Automat technology. He introduced the fundamental innovation of the drum. He found ways to make them hold both hot and cold food. He changed the way the coin slots worked.

  Self - Co-Author, 'The Automat' : Fritsche came up with the vending machine wall and all the little doors.

  Self - Automat Historian : America at this time had a real fascination with machine age technology and anything that acted like that had a big attraction. And very quickly, Horn & Hardart's new Automat was a success in Philadelphia. And the decision to expand to New York was an obvious one. It was the next, really large, industrial urban center.

  Self - Co-Author, 'The Automat' : And that was the beginning of one of the most successful restaurant chains in America, ever.

• Self - Automat Historian : Around the time Horn & Hardart were opening their first restaurants in Philadelphia, the automatic restaurant was showing up in various parts of northern Europe. These restaurants were basically dumb waiter systems where you would order something in a dining room upstairs and that order would be conveyed to people downstairs who'd prepare the food and then send it up via a small dumb waiter. Frank Hardart discovered this Automat in Germany and arranged to import the enitre Automat along with some engineers to install it in what was then the first automatic restaurant in America.

• Self - Automat Historian : Between the 1880s and 1920 or so, the number of stenographers in New York City jumped from 5,000 to 300,000. This enormous growth in the number of women in the workforce, meant that there was enormous growth in the number of women who needed to eat lunch out of their homes.

• Self - Automat Historian : Horn & Hardart was loosing money on every cup of coffee that they sold. Post-war inflation made everything more expensive and the nickel was no longer worth what it once was. They waited as long as they could afford to, until finally Horn & Hardart raised the price of coffee. But, the vending machine couldn't take pennies. So, Horn & Hardart had to go to ten cents. They doubled the price. The results were disastrous. The number of cups of coffee sold immediately dropped 70 million a year to 45 million.

• Self - Automat Historian : Even though Horn & Hardart only operated in two cities, in it's day and for many decades, it was the largest restaurant chain in America, by any measure. The number of restaurants it had, the number of people it served every day, the number of people it employed, it was a true phenomenon of its time.