Pneumatic Cashier

[W. Gray]

The latest GEICO gecko commercial fades back to the 1930s when pneumatic tubes were used for transactions.

Does anyone remember the pneumatic cashier tubes in the department stores?

There would be many sales clerks on the floor or floors in a department store but no cash register. The sales clerk would write up a sale by hand, take the money from the customer and place both in a large cartridge and shoot it by air in a tube to the cashier, who usually was located out of sight on another floor.

This is not unlike how drive in bank tellers take and provide cash to automobile customers.

The cashier would receive the cartridge, double check the sales clerk's figures, provide change and provide a receipt, which he or she then shot back to the sales clerk by the air line. There were air tubes running all over the place in a big store and us kids would amuse ourselves by watching the little "cars" shoot through the tubes.

I did some clothes shopping in downtown Coffeyville in 1975 and a department store was still using that process.

GEICO, by the way, is the Government Employees Insurance Company, a private company originally created in the 1930s to sell insurance only to federal government employees. The company figured that these employees would be less of a risk to insure.

Sometime around the 1970s, the company went "public."

[larryJ]

Ahhhhh------Woolworths and J.C. Penny's comes to mind.  I am sure that there were many others, but those two hit me right away. 

Larryj

[Marcia Moore]

I know the JCPenney store at Coffeyville had these tubes when I was little, and Bradley's Variety Store in Sedan did, too.  The Corner Drug Store at Sedan had a similar idea.  They had a can on a string that went straight up, from the clerk on the ground floor to the pharmacist, John McKimmens, who worked upstairs.  When the prescription was filled, he would let the can, which held the prescription, back down.

[Wilma]

The one I remember was the JCPenney store on N. Broadway in Wichita.  I don't know how long it was used because I don't know when that store was closed.

[Dee Gee]

I remember them, it seems like a store in Eureka had them but I don't remember which one. I also like to watch the little packets zip through the clean tubes and wonder where they went and when they would come shooting back.

[W. Gray]

It seems to me the J. C. Penny store in my town had hidden tubes.

As a kid, I got to see Mr. Penny once when he came to the local store for a visit. I was quite disappointed because he was such a gray haired feeble looking old man.

By this time in his life he had only an honorary status in his own company, but we did not know that at the time. He was more of a public relations man visiting each of his many stores, notifying the newspapers beforehand for publicity, etc.

Supposedly, the first J. C. Pennys store is still open in Kemmerer, Wyoming, a town about the size of Eureka.

Sam Walton began his career working at a J. C. Pennys store.

[Diane Amberg]

I remember those very well. Woolworth's etc. The last one I remember still working was in the Newark Department store, well into the late 70s or early 80s I think, when the store finally closed. The big malls did it in.

[sixdogsmom]

Montgomery Ward in Wichita had them. A trip there was always a treat, whether to see your feet through your shoes in the floroscope at the shoe department, or a visit with Santa Claus complete with a copy of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer, and a visit to the large display of electric trains, all running of course. Right then I decided that being a girl wasn't really all that much fun, cause I wanted one of those trains! And when one of my folks bought something we got to watch those amazing tubes. When I was in Jr. High, that is where my letter sweater came from also.

[greatguns]

I believe the last one I saw in use was in Calverts in Augusta.

[W. Gray]

Sixdogsmom,

What you were too young to know about that fluoroscope machine, and what your mother did not know about that machine, and most importantly, what the shoe salesman who was the most at risk did not know about that machine, was that those x-ray machines were a potential major hazard to your health.

In 1957, Lionel issued a pink train set just for girls. It was a total flop.

Montgomery Ward created Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer when a Jewish employee wrote a poem about him for the company. That man's brother-in-law, put the poem into a song that Gene Autry made into the #1 hit of 1949.