How Automats Worked

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here, but Chuck is Chuck's Your nickname is Poopy.

McGhee, actually Puky mcke not both. Now let's here's the story, everybody. I went to Mexico City again and got sick again, thankfully at the end, and I couldn't record yesterday, but we were in danger of missing a pubblished date for the first time, yes in seventeen years.

Grave danger. I would say, like, it's Wednesday at three and we need an episode for tomorrow at five am.

Right, and we've never cut it this close. So first of all, my friend, thank you for your flexibility.

Thank you for not throwing up long enough to record this episode.

I lasted up about an hour ago, man. And the main problem is it's just I've been in like a fugue state. Man. I have nothing in my body for three days now. Yeah, so I'm just like spacey and can I told you want to email you guys still love this that like, I'll go thirty minutes where I just like, I'm just so zoned out. I can't have a I don't even have a coherent thought for a half hour. And Josh said, well, that part sounds kind of nice.

It really does man to be able to just turn it off.

Yeah, but you know, I love that city. I'm gonna keep going back. I'm gonna maybe next time drink only bottled things and not even cocktails with ice. I'm trying to figure out what's triggering me. It may just be my biome and some of the food. I don't know.

You need to learn four words in Spanish. I'll have that neat.

Okay, it's not a bad idea, but I'm still gonna go back. I'm gonna try it again. And this may have also triggered my diverticulitis. Oh so that may be why it's extending here in to day three. I don't know, but I'm here and this gives us, dude a rare opportunity to do anything newsy or like current if you want to mention anything.

Well, that's what we're doing. We're doing an episode on automats. There's nothing more newsier current than that.

That's right, automats. And we need to give a big shout out to a documentary called The automat By from director Lisa Hurwitz, because it's great and I saw it a couple of years ago and that's what inspired this episode. But I wanted to I don't want to like write on the heels of this great doc you know, kind of swoop in and do a podcast episode about it. But great documentary. It's streaming on Max. Highly recommend it. She did a great job. I can't wait to see

Here. We have another other huge shout out to give. This is the first episode we're doing with help from our new writer, Laura Claus.

So, yeah, welcome aboard Laura. Laura came to us through Libya, which is all the recommendation we needed right.

Right exactly, and she's been great. I've been thinking, Chuck, a lot of our writers have good nicknames. Okay, Laura spells her last name like claw claw Son, So I think we should call Laura doctor Claw.

Okay, I thought you're gonna say the Clauster.

No, doctor Claw. It's an inspector, gadget reference doctor.

Oh okay, I never watched that.

That was good. I actually have seen it. So if you don't have cable but you have an antenna over the air antenna. Oh yeah, there's a station called me TV and they just play all sorts of great reruns and everything. Well, they just launched a whole new channel called me TV Tunes and they show some deep cut tunes. I mean, like Beetlejuice the cartoon. There's Scooby Doo on at six pm Eastern every day, which makes me very happy.

Uh, where is this in your off grid panic room? Like, where are you watching antenna TV?

Oh no, I've got I've got a really high tech setup. I have hijacked the coaxial cables throughout my house and I connected my outdoor antenna to the indoor cable feed so I can connect TVs throughout my house to get the reception from the outdoor antenna.

That is the Josh Clarkiest thing I've ever heard.

It worked really well. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, So there you go. You don't need to just stream. You can also get free TV.

Heck yeah, man, I had free TV for many, many, many many years.

Yeah, well, you need to be watching me TV tunes.

Chuck, all right, I'll check it out. Should we talk auto match or did you have another announcement?

No, no, I don't have any announcements, but I do have a question for you.

Okay, Chuck, mm hmmm?

Have you ever eaten food?

Right? By the way, this is gonna be a tough one for me to get through for obvious reasons.

Yeah.

Yeah, because in the first paragraph I saw the words oyster stew earlier and I almost vomited in my mouth.

Yeah. Same here, And I don't even have diverticulitis.

I have not eaten food in three days, but I used to eat food.

Oh nice, Okay, well, Chuck, then I think you would have enjoyed a trip to the Automat.

That's right, and we've been at it for six minutes, we might as well go in and say that. The Automat was a grouping of chain restaurants, self serve restaurants, sort of like a cafeteria, but instead of being served in a line where people would dump food on a tray, they had these walls filled with glass fronted compartments, and you would put in some money and a slot and you would open the door and get your piece of pie or your chicken pot pie or your pot roast or whatever have you.

Yeah, your oyster stew. Yeah, but you got to you you would walk up and you just sit there with your finger like on your lower lip, looking from case to case, trying to figure out what appealed to you right then, very much like you were looking at the menu, but you were looking at the actual food you were going to consume instead, So you didn't even need to be able to read to know what you wanted at this at an automat. And then, like you said, you put your money in and you get your food out,

Yeah, I mean the last one, this is remarkable, The very last one in New York close in ninety one. Yeah, which is hard to believe. They saw a couple of sad decades, a few sad decades before that. But we'll get to all that. But should we go to the beginning.

Yeah, let's start at the beginning. That seems appropriate.

And where else are we going to go but our old friend Germany, Because the first automat popped up in Berlin in eighteen ninety five, and the word automat was just more of a general term for a ventding machine in Germany, but it won a gold medal a couple of years later at the Brussels World Fair. Europe kind of got into them a little bit, and they spread around Europe over the next five or so years before making the leap to the United States.

Yeah, and it took a little college try, I guess, the first few times for to make that leap across the Atlantic. And it was two guys, Joseph Horn and Frank Harder, whose last names would become synonymous with automats. In fact, depending on what city you were in, you would probably refer to the automat as a Horn and hard Arc. That's just like they were like the Kleenex of automats essentially, right. Yeah, they were already in business together.

Yeah, Their first one in Philly, which was the first one overall, was nineteen oh two, but the equipment, you know, because it started in Europe, was in Europe, and they tried to get some of the stuff shipped over there, you know, these big beautiful cases with the coin slots and the little windows and everything, and the ship sunk in the Atlantic, so they lost all that gear. They tried again, and these were victim to a warehouse fire, but salvageble. They repaired that stuff. They got them up

Yeah. And so Horn and Hard Arts automats, I think, like you said, started in Philadelphia, and then after Harcombe went out of business, the Horn and Hardart kind of muscled in on that market, which is actually pretty brave because somebody had already proven that automats may not work in New York. Good point, But I guess they had faith in their food. They were like, have you tried this oyster stew? It's amazing, God of stuff saying that and so they they hit New York I think in

Yeah, and this is like, uh, that's funny. By the way, this is like during the Great Depression, like people were going out of business right and left, and they actually H and H thrived during the depression because again, everything was really cheap. It was comforting stuff. As you'll see, the coffee was great, the food was fresh and well, maybe not more than anything, but additionally it was it was it was a great place to go. They were

They were also known because they were clean and safe and you could get really good coffee for a nickel. They became places where you would just go sit and like rest your dogs, or take a load off for a little while, or catch your breath, whatever you wanted to do for a little while, and one of the reasons why people did that was because part of the allure of the automat was that there was no front of house staff. Generally, there were no servers, there was

Yeah, I mean that's kind of hard to believe in a way, because they were so successful there, you would think in the other places, like of course the obvious ones. They went to Chicago, Boston, DC, and Detroit and some other places. But you know, those were big cities, and

I have my own take. At the very least in Detroit, it didn't work because of the name they used for the restaurant. The Automat in Detroit was called Automatic lunch Room Number one. I mean that's like, that's like the Cereal. It's like a plain white box that says brand flakes and just black font yeah, or beer like that beer? Can you got me that time?

Oh?

Yeah?

I mean I kind of like the off brand stuff, but yeah, that's definitely weirdly vague.

That's not off brand, that's off brand awful. You want to take a break.

H yeah, let's take a break. We'll be right back.

Take a break so you can go throw up.

Okay, we're back. I did not throw up. I think of good. It's been subsiding every day in the in the afternoon and I feel fine, and then in the morning again I'm nauseous. So that's why I think it's a diverticulitis.

Man, that is awful. Are you going to be able to record tomorrow?

We'll see right, No, I'll be okay, I'll be fine.

Good. I'm gonna do a lot of studying after this, okay, kid, all right.

So we were talking about the busyness of New York and why it worked out there, and one of the other reasons it was really popular because, like I mentioned, it was it was a very clean place. They prided themselves, at least in the in the heyday decades, they did go downhill and you know, kind of fall into a little bit of shabbiness, but in the heyday they were

Yeah, they were like there was a really low likelihood that one customer was going to expose themselves to the other customers. It just wasn't that kind of place, right, Yeah, And like you said, they are gorgeous. They were Art Deco, which was the trend at the time, beautiful, and they would have some of them had like two story facades. There's a lot of marble, stained glass, bronze everywhere. They

That it's a beautiful like I would love to find one of those on eBay just there there. Oh you can buy those? How much are they?

I didn't see, but I'll get you one just just as a present for recording today. How about that?

Well, I think in the I mean it's been a while since it's seen the doc, but I think there was someone that is getting like the automat machines too and collecting in the.

Oh wow, nice, pretty cool, kind of like the MERV Griffin set. They just found them out back of a Burger King. What you remember in Seinfeld when Cramer the old MERV Griffin set and he started hosting the MERV Griffin Show in his apartment.

That's right, Burger King will come back again in this episode, believe it or not.

That's right. So you said they were rigorously clean. That was one of the things they were known for. The other thing they were known for was that their food was like, like really fresh. I couldn't think of a non offensive way to put it, but it was a really fresh take on food.

Yeah. I think it was as fresh as food could be for that format.

Exactly.

Let's say that the coffee was super fresh, like after twenty minutes, they would throw the coffee out and put new coffee in the food they did not sell the next day. And if you're thinking, what a lot of food waste because they're pre making this stuff, and you know, we'll get to that in a sec. But a little bit of genius here is they had three different day old shops in lower income neighborhoods in New York. So the next day they would sell the food there at

Day, yeah, or two and a half cents. Yeah, and you can find it.

I'll eat a pie for a week, So I'm fine with that.

For sure, as long as it hasn't fallen on the street in public, for sure. And they were also known for that really good coffee, right that came out of dolphin's mouths. So at the time, if you were in America, the coffee you drank and this is the I don't know, the nineteen tens, it was boiled, yeah, and there was no filter, no nothing, so like grounds would come out, so your coffee was gritty. There was no filter again to take out any of the oils. Any of the tastes.

That's right. They sold so much coffee that they ended up losing money on it because they kept it locked into that nickel price for thirty eight years.

Yeah, and I did the math. In nineteen twelve, which is when they hit New York, and nickel was worth a dollar sixty today. By nineteen fifty it was worth sixty four cents. So they started definitely losing money over time on that coffee.

Yeah, for sure. So they were losing money. They eventually had to raise the price. The only thing they could do was double it to ten cents. Because their slots took nickels and their sales dropped a lot, from seventy million cups a year to forty five million, they still came out on top revenue wise, if you do the math. But I remember watching the documentary and they were talking about this. I've wondered and I haven't found my way to wrap my head around how to actually do this topic.

Maybe we could tie it into the idea that I had about why everything is so much more expensive now, even really maybe speaking than it used to be.

Yeah, because I mean the idea of like doubling the cost of something is crazy, even if it's a nickel to a dime. At the time, like doubling your price is just insanity for a business, But there was nothing else they could do.

But even still, even doubling the price from a nickel to a dime in nineteen fifties money that was still twenty or so cents less than what they were getting for in nineteen twelve, Yeah, adjusting for inflation. So it sounds like to me the bigger problem is that they just doubled it overnight. And again that's all they could do because their slots only took nickels. Yeah, so that's what they had to deal with. But like you said,

Yeah, they also sold a lot of pie, and I do remember this from the dock. Pie was a very big deal at H and H in nineteen sixty four. Here's a pretty fun stat They sold an average of eight hundred and twenty two pieces of pie in New York City between eight and eleven am. And there are some people who said, some historians that have said that I don't know about this, but maybe that there was a desire for people to do things like eat pie for breakfast, but if you had to order it from

Right, pancakes with apples on them?

Yeah, exactly. But at the autumat you could just do it, you know, on the down low and be quiet about it. I just I didn't know people would be judgy like that back then. But maybe, uh.

Yeah, I think everybody, yeah, because they were pretty proper back then too, you.

Know, pie for breakfast.

Even today, though I went and looked, I was like, okay, surely our attitudes have changed. No, no, they haven't. If you look up breakfast pies, it's all like, you know, breakfast stuff, but in like a pie shell or something like that. There's no one out there eating actual pie for breakfast. It's insane.

Uh yeah, because it's a dessert. It's a little weird.

First.

I like the idea, but it is a dessert.

You can make the case that almost all breakfast foods are desserts in the United States. Man, have you heard of like I hop.

So after your steak dinner you can get a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit exactly.

I would that sounds good, although I don't like biscuits very much as a sandwich. I like a biscuity on its own, like say cracker barrel. If you get biscuits and honey, okay, really good. But if you take that biscuit, cut it in half and put anything like a a cheese or something on them, like this is grody. Give me an English muffin, make it a mist Wow.

Okay, never knew that. All right, still getting to know each other after all these years. All right, So let's talk a little bit about the nickel throwers. Because if you're gonna require a bunch of nickels, you're gonna have to have a bunch of nickels. And you don't often come in with a bunch of nickels as a consumer. So they had change people. They were women, basically. They

I thought, that's funny. So I guess they decided that that ninety nine cent price really brought people in more than a one dollar movie would. Huh maybe.

And I'm curious how much they would lose in a year on those pennies.

I don't know.

You know.

One of the things though, Chuck, did you see I guess in the documentary the nickel throwers and like the bubble, the glass bubble, Yeah, fronted things that they said and they look like fortune tellers.

Yeah, it's pretty funny, but it was part of.

That whole ornate look to everything, like its just the whole Most of those places were really.

Pretty Yeah, absolutely, and you know, like you said, it conveyed a sense of the future. Like kids loved it for that reason because they were it was like being in the Jetsons or something. But kids also loved it because that gave him a sense of autonomy to go in there and get a couple of nickels from their parents and to be able to walk up and pick something out.

You got to read that Neil Simon quote.

It's great Neil Simon. I take issue with this quote or the end of it. Oh you okay, Neil Simon, the Great Neil Simon said this when he was a child about going there or as an adult, about going there as a child, to have your own stack of nickels placed in your tiny hands, to be able to choose your own food richly on display like museum pieces, to make quick and final decisions at the age of eight.

Maybe you look there, you think that hyperbolic. Yeah, that's probably so, but it is a pretty great quote for it's very sweet. So one of the things though, is, including people like Neil Simon and other people who were interviewed in the Automat documentary, people tend to remember the food as like good, and it's entirely possible it was for a while. But the older, the longer you go along in the history of the Automat, the worse the

Closed it's probably wasn't too good.

Right, You shouldn't really compare the food in general over the course of the history of the automat to that last one. But I'm guessing it was probably pretty decent for a while based on some of the stuff I'm reading.

I bet it was pretty good, if for no other reason than in the nineteen twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, they use real food, right, and real ingredients, and it wasn't like it is today. So I just think by virtue of that, it was probably not bad.

You know. Yeah, I'm with you, So, Chuck, I say, we talk about how automated the automat really was, because it turns out not really. It was really a facade. Literally, it was a facade of food that seemed to be mysteriously conjured out of nowhere, possibly by robots.

Yeah, and that was one of the selling points that, you know, another piece of pie on a tiny plate would pop into that window when one went out. It's not like it just stayed empty. I guess if they ran out of pie, it would or they'd probably put you know, something else in there. But they had a huge actually a few different central commissaries in the city

Yeah. So say that you went up and you're like, I'm going to have that delicious bowl of bubbling, greasy oyster stew that's just sitting there looking at me in the face. I think one of those oysters might still be alive. That's how good it was. Right, And you put your nickel in and you pull the lever correct.

I don't remember if there was a lever, but that sounds about.

Right, or like you pulled the like you were buying cigarettes as a kid when you were fourteen in a coin operated machine, that kind of lever what I'm talking about, right.

Well, I didn't like you did, but sure I saw the bad kids doing that exactly.

So you would do something like that and then either it would open like it would allow the little glass compartment window to open up so you could get your oyster stew or what have you from inside, or it might rotate a drum like you were saying, so that

I'm struggling.

I'm sorry.

I know you're doing it on a purpose. It's all fun.

That last part was purpose.

For a while there they didn't have hot windows. They just had the cold windows, so the hot food was served from a steam table. But it was not too long until they had the hot windows and the cold windows, or the hot cases. Probably how they treated their workers is a matter of debate. They struck a couple of times. Nineteen thirty seven they struck. They had three thousand employees at the time. That failed. That organizing effort did not hold.

Great that I loved the workers, Yeah, exactly. There was also an actor named Apache Ramos, who is best known for playing one of the orphans in The Warriors, but also is lesser known as having managed the Fat Boys in the eighties.

Oh the Warriors. That Warriors.

Yeah, like, come out and play a patchie ramos.

Okay, I'll have to check that guy out.

Oh man, he had a magnificent afro in that in that movie.

Yep, I totally know exactly the guy.

Yeah what a great Yeah. But he also managed the Fat Boy like the Fat Boys are back, uh huh. In the eighties, he worked at an automatic and so did his grandmother. I'm assuming one or the other got the other one the job. But he remembered that the horn and Hardart would throw holiday parties for the workers children around like Christmas time. Oh man, can you imagine how beautiful those places looked when they were decorated for

Yeah, yeah, for sure. This reminds me of a childhood trauma that I suffered because growing up, my sister had a best friend whose father worked for Craft Foods and they had a big craft like they rented six flags or something. It was some big thing every year. Wow, my brother's best friend worked for Coca Cola, and every year they had the big Coca Cola picnic thing. I had nobody an never got to go in. Every single year I had to watch Scott and Michelle go to the craft event in the coc event.

Man, that's terrible.

Yeah, it just it still sticks with me after all these years.

Your friend Richie was like, well, my dad owns the tire shop. So you come to that. We don't really have a party, but we stand around.

Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll take another break and talk about the inclusivity of the automat right after this.

Okay, Chuck, just before we took a break, you nailed it up on the head. You said, we're talking about the inclusivity of the automatic and in particular the horn and Harder automat, which again they were synonymous with automats.

Yeah, for sure. They had a motto which would serve everybody and serve everybody in the same way, which is a great quote. And Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, is in the documentary and it's a great, really sweet interview and he said, the one we would usually go to is automat on forty second straight, forty Sive Street. I never even thought about the fact that I'm a black kid. Should I go into horn and hardart? Is

Yeah, that's pretty cool. There was also a historian named Lisa Keller I believe in the documentary pointed out that if you were an immigrant, this was a great place for you to go because you just went and looked at the food and put your nickel in. You didn't really have to be able to read or speak English, and you could still get a good meal of boysters too. I can't wait to see what Aaron Cooper does with this.

Yeah. They were also known for their celebrity fans. They had those one very famous Esquire spread. Of course, this is for Esquire, so it was all set up. But in nineteen fifty one, Audrey Hepburn was a photograph for Esquire. So cute shopping at an automat, very cute. But in the documentary Reiner and Brooks, you know, Carl Reiner and mel Brooks loved the automat and they talked with great adoration about their childhood of going to those restaurants.

Yeah, and James Dean his favorite big beans in the world were horn and hard arts big.

Beans, James bean more like, that's right.

He really knew what he was talking about too. That's how he died in that car accident. He was eating some big beans at the time and lost control of the steering wheel. God, that's not true, everybody. We did a short stuff on it, so, yeah, exactly, don't at me.

So, I guess we're at the sad point, like so many of these episodes that we do on a cool thing from the past. Where the decline begins. The nineteen sixties is when that started, although they were still like a huge deal culturally. You know, everyone knew about the automat and I don't think we mentioned you know, at a certain point in New York City, they were so famous that it was like, when you go to visit New York, you would go to an auto that just for that experience.

Right, Like how like when we were kids, you went to that city's like hard rock cafe to get the.

Yeah sure remember that, oh man, totally Yeah.

You wear with your Panama Jack sunglasses and everybody at home would be like, you had a great summer obviously.

Oh yeah, my band did one gig at the hard Rock Cafe here in Atlanta one time.

Wow, wed they put your guitar up under a glass case?

They did.

It'd be pretty sweet.

But the sixties is where things really started to struggle, even though they were again still popular culturally. Stockholders were involved by that point obviously, just revenues started dropping. The suburbs was a big cause of it. You know, when people started moving out to the suburbs, offices and office complexes started getting built in the suburbs, and people started shopping at malls in the suburbs, and there were fewer and fewer people just you know, walking around New York

Right, yeah, wild West Room. I could not find a picture of that, but apparently one of the automats this one in Times Square they put a Wild West Room inn in nineteen sixty six. I mean, I'm sure people would have gone crazy for that in nineteen sixty six.

Not a wild restroom. That's every restroom in New York City.

There's like a ton of potted plants and a tiger in there.

Right. They also tried to beer garden, They tried the roller skate waiters thing. They tried entered you know, live bands and dancing and stuff like that. But eventually Horn and Hardert looked at each other and they said, well this has clearly seen its best days. The silver lining is as we are sitting on a bunch of really valuable real estate.

I know, like forty buildings in Manhattan.

Yeah, so they don't feel too bad.

They were doing okay, no, but instead of selling them, they said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's remove the automat and put burger Kings in instead. They have franchises, So that's where you would have gotten your old automat cases is in the back of a burger King.

I was just about to improvise one of those terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible Burger King commercial songs.

That's that's one of the big drawbacks to watching Me Trevy tunes.

Oh oh, is that on there too?

There's this one Burger King that keeps playing over and over and over again. I had to hit myself in the knee with the hammer to get it out of my head.

Well, is this whole new campaign with a guy that's singing, Yeah, that can't sing.

Don't don't do it. No, no, no, that's like my oysters too.

Well, I guess I won't do a song right now.

Actually I know exactly why now we're even exactly so yeah, I guess you can. Just if you can mute the the the TV fast enough, then you can keep watching me TV tunes.

Yeah, yeah, all right, So burger Kings went in, Automats were going downhill. Another thing that happened was as they started going downhill, a different kind of shopper started coming in there. People that were itinerant, to people that were unhoused, people that were vagrants and just sort of coming through town who knew that they could hang out there for that nickel cup of coffee for hours and hours and hours.

No, in those same families, they're like, Oh, let's go down to the automat step in and they're like, oh, it's ced here, So they stopped coming in, which just reinforced the ability of the homeless population to hang out. And Horn and hard Art. Horn and hard Art's whole thing was serve everybody, and serve everybody the same way. So as far as I ever saw, they weren't exactly rousing vagrants who were hanging out drinking like a cup

Yeah. Another big part of that is, like these this huge central commissary kitchens where they were cooking all this stuff is an excellent, excellent, efficient way to do it when you are booming with business. Once business drops and you're not cooking, you're not needing to cook as much. All of a sudden, your the economy of scale isn't there any longer, and you have these huge places with fewer employees and less food being pumped out, and it's just it was just a downward spiral. It's very sad.

Yep. So the other thing too is it's it's interesting and I think it's kind of appropriate that Horn and Hardart got into fast food franchises because the automat kind of helped lay the foundation for that. But rather than hundreds of different dishes, which is apparently what Horn and hard are offered at each of their automats, you know, fast food has like ten and like yess, you can have it your way, but really you can have it your way choosing from these five ingredients or whatever. And

Yeah, basically that last one that closed in ninety one. It was the last one starting in nineteen seventy seven at two hundred East forty second Street. So right there, you know, sort of your time square. Sure, and it lasted fourteen years on its own as a nostalgia piece basically before becoming a gap.

That's right, it's the gap.

What else?

So, like you said, if you went to New York, like you go to the Empire State Building, you might go see a Broadway play and you would go eat it in an automat. That's just how iconic it was, right. It popped up like anytime you're trying to get across how New York your your movie was like, there would be a scene in an automat or something like that. Yeah.

Man, I've been through apocalypse now.

Bugs Bunny went to an automat and the hair grows in Manhattan.

That's right. What the flintstones? They even had a flintstone automat in a nineteen sixty two episode.

And there's a book that I think I've heard of, but I'd never read from the mixed up files of this is Basil E. Frank Weiler.

That sounds familiar.

Well, the thing that sounds familiar to me is that these kids hide out living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Oh, that's the Royal Tanne Bombs that's.

Yeah, I guarantee homage to that then. Yeah. But anyway, in this children's book, these kids are runaways and they live in MAT That's the Met, right. The Met isn't the opera house, it's the art museum.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Met.

Yeah, okay, right, Well, one of the things that they do is they feed themselves by going to the automat.

Oh that's fun. And I did not know he totally Yeah, let's call him homage. You're kinder than I am.

Oh yeah, Wes Anderson does not rip stuff off. He lovingly pays homage to it.

That's right, that's right. Pat Boone tried his version of the automat called the Dino Matt in nineteen sixty two, which was frozen food that was then microwave. That did not work out too well, that's supprising. But there were a few other things over the years that were tried like this that did not take off like the automat did.

My favorite was the Andy Matt.

Yeah, what's up with that?

Andy Warhol. This is just what an artist he was. He could just talk about it. He just mention something in passing and people are still talking about it fifty years later. But he said that he was going to come up with the chain of Andy Matts, which are like automats, but instead of having to go get your food from a case, you would sit down on like a red mohair banquette and order through a pneumatic tube

Oh, that's funny, but that never happened at all, right, just an idea.

No, I didn't, but there's some people who are trying to revive it.

Yeah, I mean there are things like this. I mean Japan has stuff like this, right.

They have what's called katain zushi.

Okay, what's that.

It's the sushi that comes around in a conveyor belt.

Now, but they I've seen little windows as well of things. It may not be hot food, maybe it's other things.

Yeah, I'm sure that they do. I remember going to Toledo Hospital visit my mom when she's at work, and they had basically auto sandwiches Like I always just thought it was like a like a vending machine, a vending machine. Yeah, but they know it was an automat basically. Yeah.

There's a place in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. I think there are like twelve of them and here in Canada and they I just looked up a picture of them, and they they had these little automat kind of like cubbies that you order through an app like

One of the things you can choose for that pizza maker is I don't want the cheese to scald the roof of my mouth, right, And the pizza machines like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, definitely not.

And then they have a hidden camera on you, right and spit out a picture of you going, ah.

Yeah, yeah, damn it, you got anything else?

I have nothing else. I don't think I have to puke. I think this is the best I've felt in a few days. So hopefully that.

That makes me feel good about the effect I have on you.

Yeah, just a little josh, a little side cup of oyster stew. I'm back on my feet again.

There you go. Well, since Chuck's back on his feet again. Obviously, anyone who's ever listened to this show before knows that he just unlocked the listener mail.

That's right, this is short and sweet. This is kind of fun because it's a this is coming out tomorrow and it's a correction on an episode that was just out awesome. So maybe for a change we won't get like four hundred emails from crafters.

Okay, oh yeah, hey guys, are the.

High Times episode In Martha Stewart, hodgepodge is a big jumble of things that don't go together. Modgepodge is the craft supply. Just don't want you to embarrass yourselves at the craft store. That is from Kelly.

Modgepodge is what you use to glue together a big jumble of things that don't go together.

Exactly.

That's a great Kelly. Thank you, and to the other thousand of you who wrote in. It's nice to know that there are people out there still using modgepodge.

It's fun.

Yeah, I mean it's fun to say, and it's got a cute label too.

Yeah, magpodge is really a lot of fun.

I enjoy it for sure. And we heard from Martha Stewart too. She said, yes, I have Modgepodge laying around. Think Jerry got in touch with there and asked, that's right. Well, if you want to be like who Kelly? If you want to be like Kelly and right in to gently correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.