ATMs: The Money Machines

It is easy, in the modern era of easy money, to forget just how strange it was three-plus decades ago for Americans to interact this way with machines. People were used to asking for their hard-earned bucks from a human being behind a bank window. They wanted to see, with their very own eyes, each bill counted out by the teller. They required a receipt, hand-stamped by an employee of the bank, indicating that their paycheck had indeed been deposited. When the ATM arrived, it came along like an insult—not just as progress, but as preemption, a ploy to get customers to stop using expensive human tellers. (Some, of course, still hate the machines, but we'll leave that for another story.)