Grocery stores and supermarkets Before the 20th century many businesses such as
grocery stores had clerks or assistants who would serve customers individually, taking required items from the shelves, before adding up the total at the till. Some products such as ham, cheese, and bacon were sliced to order, while dry goods such as flour would be weighed out from large barrels. On September 6, 1916 the first
Piggly Wiggly opened in
Memphis, Tennessee by
Clarence Saunders, the world's first self-service grocery store. Customers would pick up a wicker basket upon entering the store, and then walk through the store placing items they intended to purchase in their baskets. As the duties of the shop clerks were reduced to stocking shelves with goods and taking
payment at the tills, a "small army of clerks" was no longer necessary, allowing for cost reductions to be passed on to the consumer. By the 1950s about 80% of the grocery trade in America was on a self-service basis.
At petrol stations In 1930 the Hoosier Petroleum Co. attempted to trial self-serve fuelling, but was prevented from doing so as it was considered a fire hazard. In 1947, Frank Urich opened the first self-service gasoline station in
Los Angeles,
California. It was an unbranded station with rows of self-service pumps and
roller-skating attendants who would collect money and reset dispensers. The pumps used mechanical computers to track how much fuel was dispensed, and were manually reset between each customer. A few other unbranded stations using this model were created, but the idea didn't catch on with major retailers at the time. In 1968, the use of "unattended fuelling" was permitted in the
City of London, with
BP announcing plans to open self-service units within the city. In the 21st century, self-service gas stations are the norm across the US, and
New Jersey is the only state "where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline."
In Banking In 1960, Armenian-American inventor
Luther Simjian invented an automated deposit machine (accepting coins, cash and cheques) although it did not have cash dispensing features. His US patent was first filed on 30 June 1960 and granted on 26 February 1963. The roll-out of this machine, called Bankograph, was delayed by a couple of years, due in part to Simjian's Reflectone Electronics Inc. being acquired by Universal Match Corporation.
The New York Times wrote in 1998 that it was his most famous invention and "the basis for the now-ubiquitous A.T.M., from which he never made a penny." His device did not see widespread adoption however. In Europe, in 1967, three independent efforts to create ATMs entered use simultaneously, the
Swedish Bankomat, and in the UK the Barclaycash and Chubb MD2. In 1968 a joint effort between
IBM and Swedish banks began testing a networked cashpoint, with
Lloyds Bank soon following, deploying networked devices in 1973. Coin-operated machines that dispensed tobacco were being operated as early as 1615 in the
taverns of England. The machines were portable and made of
brass. An English bookseller,
Richard Carlile, devised a newspaper dispensing machine for the dissemination of banned works in 1822. Simon Denham was awarded British Patent no. 706 for his stamp dispensing machine in 1867, the first fully automatic vending machine. Vending machines are considerably popular in Japan. There are more than 5.5 million machines installed throughout the nation, and Japan holds the highest ratio of machines per person for any country with one machine for every twenty-three people.
Buffets Starting in the 19th century,
supper, a lighter post-
dinner evening meal began to sometimes be served as (and so called) a 'buffet', particularly at larger events such as grand balls. Likewise large cooked
English breakfasts were often served this way. The term came from the French
sideboard which the food was traditionally placed on, before becoming applied to the self-service format of food. The
all-you-can-eat restaurant was introduced in
Las Vegas by Herbert "Herb" Cobb McDonald in 1946.