In the world of retail modernization, this story is number one with a bullet.
Is there anything more 20th-century American than vending machines? They revolutionized life in the 1900s. By 1890, New York City had placed automated chewing gum dispensers on its railway platforms; soft drinks were delivered by mechanical means in 1937; and back in the social Stone Age, Americans used machines to secure their cigarettes.
In the U.S., all the following have been procured courtesy of mechanized merchants:
- Fish bait
- Blurays and DVDs
- Lottery tickets
- Cologne
- Books
- Stamps
- Cupcakes
- Life insurance
- Condoms
- Over-the-counter drugs
Person-free peddling appliances have also gotten political. In California, machines have meted out marijuana; in heavily Democratic Connecticut, they’ve dealt abortion drugs. But red states have their own ways of revolutionizing life for the masses. And in the southeast, the…
