[grogenaut]

The go tech is amazing in 2 places: airport and stadium beverage tunnels. There's a premium price and high volume in those areas. The go tech has basically revolutionized the speed of getting a beer and a dog at the stadium here in Seattle. I can be back in my seat in 4 minutes including the bathroom now which for NFL means I can literally be back in a commercial break sometimes.

no idea how much they make on it, but it's a game changer in that small area.

[trollbridge]

One wonders just how much technology is needed to dispense a beer and a hot dog.

[afavour]

Couldn't you just use vending/automat machines in these scenarios? Beers in particular are... not complicated. I believe the go tech makes the existing situation better but if you were to reimagine it from ground up I can't help but imagine you could do better.

[rvnx]

Huge queues

[mrguyorama]

Automats don't have to have huge queues.

One employee as a stocker/chef can support higher throughput in automat style than in counter style fast food service because you have a much more focused task (put food in empty cubby, repeat) than the normal process of "Take order, take money, get order, give customer, deal with mistakes"

They can have an entire wall full of panels for the same item, so that purchases are heavily parallelized. There's usually only a single digit number of items available.

Automats seemingly died because inflation made it hard to accept payment, but that has been a solved problem in vending machines since then.

Japan and some other places still do a lot of vending machine food, but the specific "Wall of items" Automat format enables great logistics that you don't get from vending machines. Weirder still, there are places in asia I have seen that have a AutomatWall style setup, but cook food to order, so you end up waiting!

You can't use an Automat for beer though, without some sort of external system to only allow use by "adults". But surely that's true of a vision system?

[Breza]

I've been FASCINATED by Automats ever since I watched Bugs Bunny as a child. The idea that you could just walk up, look at what looked good, and buy it seemed indescribably awesome.