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The cash 'machine'

A

Alberta

Super Moderator
Staff member
Do you remember this contraption in some of the stores.
The cash would be put inside a cylinder and sent sometimes by a tube or otherwise by overhead wires to the cashier and the change and receipt would come back the same way.

The tube method must have operated by air/gas someway because it always made a 'whoosh' sound.

When we played shop we would put a tin can on a piece of string and fix it across the room and operate it by hand.
 
Just read your mum's story Sue
Well written and very enjoyable
Foster Brothers used to have some sort of vacuum tube system as well and they were still using it well into the 60s.
 
Jerry said:
Just read your mum's story Sue
Well written and very enjoyable
Foster Brothers used to have some sort of vacuum tube system as well and they were still using it well into the 60s.
Click to expand...

Yep, I can remember the Provident cheque flying across Foster's on Soho Road in one of those thingies. :eek:
 
Just read Doreen Hall's piece on the Handsworth site, and agree with Jerry - it's really interesting. But she was talking about the spring-loaded containers that were shot along a stranded steel cable from the counters to a raised cashier's cabin in the middle of the shop. Although I grew to well over six feet in height, I never got hit by one, but I do remember them quite clearly. I think the container was a zinc casting, which had a quick-release screw gadget in which they sent the money and received the change and bill. Or more probably it was a bayonet-type connection. Doreen can tell us, I'm sure.

The other gadget was the pneumatic tube, as in Lewis's, and I think the other big department stores. Those tubes used to go all round the buildings, and they seemed to work. When we got married in 1960 (46th anniversary tomorrow), Barbara started work at the Piccadilly Hotel in London as a bill clerk, and spent all her working hours totting up accounts for rooms from the reception, food from the restaurant etc, and the final bill had to get back to the reception in good time. All communication waas normally by the pneumatic tube, or an odd telephone call. Quite a buzz she says.
Peter
 
They had the overhead wire at Fosters High St Aston and Co-ops also I'm sure they had the Tube in Sainsburuy's up to a few years ago. Happy days :)
 
At one time in my life,
I used to refit Foster Bros shops
and I had on of those money containers
(that used to fly by tube across to the cash
point) I used it to keep grease in,very handy
had it for years,(made of brass) O0
 
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