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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.

[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...

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There were also automats, automated restaurants serving all food through a vending machine (or more accurately, wall). Classically all for a single fixed price (a nickle).

These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).

Mink: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y3GXMB4VPY8>

Concerto: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NT6bxlnS1Is>

And what some of us might not have the context for, is that grocery stores at the time were usually clerk-serviced; Just like you don't pump your own gas in New Jersey, at the time the norm was that you handed the clerk a list of products and they fetched them from the shelves for you.

Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.

And surprisingly, it was actually Piggly Wiggly that was the first grocery store to open up their warehouse and allow customers to self-service! [1]

> Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service grocery store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History

And both PW and Keedoozle were launched by Clarence Saunders (touched on in the history link you give, more under his bio page):

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Saunders>

Wow, this man was decades ahead of his time. My hat off.

Incredible, they were 75 years ahead of their time.

That kinda stuff is why I'm an incrementalist, as opposed to "Great Man" theories of civilization. A big impressive product or leap-forward is mostly luck and thousands of cascading preconditions on small improvements everywhere else, and often not even the first person to try.

It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.

But if the technology is not ready to be implemented yet, was it really a genius level idea?

Here’s my idea: instant teleportation.

I expect to be credited

I think that's kind of the point: there are no "genius ideas", at least not at the level and frequency popularly portrayed. If teleportation isn't feasible then the idea isn't genius. If teleportation is feasible, then using it for transporting humans isn't genius, it's incredibly obvious.

Or to give a real-world example: The Wright brothers did some great work on making aircraft steerable and doing wind-tunnel tests, but working planes were mostly a product of ICE engines finally reaching sufficient power-to-weight ratios, not of the Wright brothers being unique geniuses. In a long line of people trying to build heavier-than-air aircraft they were simply the first to have access to the necessary technology to make it work

Thank you for that rabbit hole. Interesting that the same guy gave us both of the present day shopping systems just one was too far ahead

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