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*Okay, so I'm being a bit fanciful. Have seen these in a few "period" films, etc.:
http://www.mcny.org/Exhibitions/automat … t.htm]Horn & Hardart's Automat
Was reminded of this again in an article in a favorite magazine of mine, Reminisce. One elderly lady recalled eating at the H & H Automat as a child, which she and her family called "Push Nickels" instead.
Anyway, would be cool to have a set-up like this on Mars...or anywhere. The article in the magazine said the last of the automats closed in 1991. Dang, I could have visited it!
Dicktice, if you read this, did you ever eat at an automat?
--Cindy
p.s. -- guess I'd better mention this would be cool as a cafeteria setup; I'm not interested in setting up corporations on Mars.
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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AKA Dark City...Automat scene.
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As a kid growing up, there were films shown to us of the future and how meals would be available at the touch of a button. Nowadays these are the frozen TV dinner and the food vending machines amoung others. With all sorts or varieties of fine foods to partake of.
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I wouldn't mind seeing fast-food places start going this way. They already make everything beforehand, it already sits for an undetermined length of time under heat lamps, why not do so in a cabinet that the customer can remove it from themselves, thereby skipping the vacant-stared epsilon giving you the wrong stuff step?
Between that and those automated checkout lanes (which would be much better if they didn't talk) a person could probably go for weeks at a time without speaking to a single real human being face to face.
For Mars I could see it working, lots of pre-made foodstuffs on little shelves in communal space. A cafeteria without staff, except for the poor shlub that keeps the shelves stocked. A chow line without surly cooks.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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