The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway

atlasobscura.com

38 pointsductionist15 comments

This is one of those things where it's like, are people just making stuff up? Like dogs "bred to run on a wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog

I continue to be amazed by how much effort over the years went in to moving and managing random physical objects around (money, file folders, books, etc). There have been two parallel processes, one optimizing the process (e.g. containerization, JIT delivery, et al) the other eliminating the physical stuff (e.g. files as data, money as data etc). Both processes are at their core ones of abstraction, though all sorts of vestigial traces remain (e.g. calling directories "folders", or even the term "file").

When I go to offices I feel that a lot of that subject matters (physical stuff) has merely been replaced by people moving data around (copying entries into a spreadsheet, for example, or writing reports). That's what we'll get rid of next and again, I believe it will be through a process of abstraction.

high-spirited sales clerks would occasionally try to prank them by placing live mice or dead spiders inside the canisters. In-store gossip and romances could be covertly conducted by secret messages passed back and forth via the cash-carrier wires.

Create a link between people, capable of carrying messages (or dynamic entertainments), and hijinks and love will follow.

After reading this article, I still don't understand what problem these were solving that is now solved by other means. Why was there a need to rapidly transport cash around the store in the first place? This apparently isn't needed anymore, so what problem existed then that no longer exists now?

The article says cash carriers went away due to 1. pneumatic tubes, and 2. automatic counter registers. However, pneumatic tubes isn't much of an answer, because that's just a different way of rapidly transporting cash, and those are now gone as well.

So presumably the real answer has to be these "automatic counter registers". But the article never elaborates on what those are. How does an automatic counter register differ from earlier cash registers, and why was it that without them one needed a rapid cash transport method?

The idea seemed to be that the customer could check out with clerks around the store, but the cash was stored and counted in a secure area by trusted employees.

A decline in robberies probably also helped. Department stores like Sears and Macy's now have distributed cash registers around the store, sometimes in low traffic areas, but I've never heard of them getting robbed.

I suspect that in the past stores had more staff and more different departments, which were each smaller. Think more like market stalls. Each department might not have staff dedicated to payments, but instead roving salespeople designed to advertise the benefits of goods, and then to complete the sale there and then on the shop floor.

These salespeople probably weren't paid well, or identified well, so the shipowner couldn't trust them. Instead, for every payment, they need to get a receipt from a central place, which prevents any dishonesty.

I used to work at Walmart. It wasn't uncommon for someone to go in with a crowbar at an unused register and take something. It just doesn't make the news. That's why they are always emptied on a regular schedule.

I don't believe that pneumatic tubes are gone.

Less than a decade ago they were still in use in stores in the UK and I'm not sure what would have replaced them.

A cash register slowly fills with money and there's theft risk. It's more secure to transport cash via the tube than to have staff members walking around with hundreds or thousands of pounds to the back of the store and up to a cash office.

The real difference is that more transactions are cashless EFTPOS now.

> So presumably the real answer has to be these "automatic counter registers". But the article never elaborates on what those are.

I'm not precisely sure, but having worked in POS systems I can hazard a guess: systems which record a cumulative total of transactions, linked to the employee working the register. Someone will clock in, count the contents of the drawer (A), ring up some stuff over a shift (B), then cash up at the end (C); and A + B should equal C.

This still doesn't obviate the need to move cash around (which is also entered on the register), and some supermarkets still have pneumatic systems.

Disneyland Paris has one of those, built by Disney Imagineering.

Do you have a link to pictures?

There's a whole site for cash railways.[1] It's on there.

[1] http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/

direct link: http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/photos/dlp.htm

Many Costcos still have their pneumatic tubes in place.

I'm fairly disappointed with the quality of discussion/things posted here, but from time to time, there is an article like this and all is good with the Universe again.

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