Are they still a thing? I have not been in such a place in almost 40 years. And I wonder how they worked in two respects:
They were basically remote controls for a central juke box that served the whole room, not individual separate juke boxes.
The Silver Diner at BWI Airport has them. I don’t know if they work, I haven’t tried them, but I assume they do.
I’ve never seen actual jukeboxes in every booth. But the jukebox in my parents’ diner had a machine on the table of each booth, from which diners could make selections.
The menu was like a large book stood on end. The metal pages (which contained the removable choices were flipped via a control at the bottom of the machine.
Is this what you’re referring to?
ETA: ninja’ed by commasense.
The few times I’ve seen such “mini jukeboxes,” this is exactly what they were.
A central juke box makes logical sense. That would mean, however, you might be waiting a very long time to hear your selection
Not unlike any other jukebox at a restaurant, IME.
I suppose that’s true.
I have seen them at some restaurants where the little jukebox at the table did indeed play at that individual table. The speakers were small and tinny, and usually such a novelty that there weren’t used much.
The Midway diner in Elyria, Ohio has them but a sign indicates it is just for nostalgia. Still fun to see what songs are on there.
If John Mulaney is there, a very long time, indeed:
One of those jukebox controls was depicted in Rain Man. It’s in the first couple of minutes of this scene.
Though I have seen these often, years ago, I had never used one and had absolutely no idea that they weren’t individual separate juke boxes. That makes a lot of sense.
Juke boxes held large numbers of vinyl records, fifty or more.
To operate it (as I remember vaguely),you inserted a nickle, and punched a number such as C21.
The machine held the vinyl discs (the same 45 rpm discs you could buy at a record store) in shelves, or vertical slots. A mechanical arm swung over to slot C21, picked up the disc, and put it on the turntable to play.
The 50 disks, the turntable , and the mechanism were bulky, the size of a refrigerator.
So there was no way that there could be a separate machine at each table. The table units were, as said before, just a remote control device.
The modern version of this is an app-controlled juke box, with lots of songs in digital format. And yeah, if there’s a lot of people in the place, sometimes your song is way down the queue. This is exacerbated in that the version I know of, you can pay extra to have your song come up next, called “fast passing”. So if some unscrupulous rich guy wants to, he can push your song even further down.
On the plus side, you can play songs from anywhere! So when the rich guy is there, and you’re not, you can play that one song you know he hates. Ask me how I know! 
I’ve never had an ocasion to look lately - to they still make 45 vinyl records?
Back in college I had a collection of over 200 singles but sold it. I still have a few 3" CD’s, too.
At least you can special order having your own 45 made.
In addition to those jukeboxes at your table, they also had other coin-op devices. One, a fortune telling device, was featured in a Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner.
It may be that for the tabletop minis that just played at that particular table the songs came with the machine pre-programmed, because (it seems to me) that the songs on those machines never changed. They were usually 50’s 60’s and early 70’s pop tunes.
The jukebox in my parents’ diner was owned and operated by a guy who came in every week or two. He collected the coins from all the tabletop machines (and the main jukebox, at which selections could also be made) and replaced some records with new ones. He also changed the paper labels in all the selection devices which identified the songs and artists. This was in the 1960s.
Until writing this, I never realized how much work that was.
And I’ll tell you so
She used to be…
Why am I the only one singing?
Each song at the main juke box had a pin associated with it. If you selected C-3, the main juke box would move pin C-3 to the “on” position, and also turn ON the speaker at your table. Songs were not selected chronologically, they were selected numerically. The juke box would go back and forth looking for a pin in the “on” position and then stop and play that song and then turn the pin “off”. When C-3 was finished playing, it would look to the pin at C-4, etc, until it got to the end. If you selected C-3 and pin C-3 was already “on”, it would do nothing to pin C-3. Your speakers would remain on until there were no songs waiting to be played (even songs selected by other tables). At that point all speakers were shut off and the main box shut down until someone put money in.