The NYC Automats.
IIRC they were located in NYC, but the brand name was Horn & Hardart.
Ooops! Wikipedia says they were in Philly too.
Yes, sugar cubes! When my mom would go to the bank, they were offering coffee, and I would grab a cube to eat.
Sugar cubes? Still sold and when I worked in the office 18 months ago, I used them.
I miss all the analog sound stuff for this reason. Not the analog sound, but analog manipulation. There was so much that a kid could do creatively with tapes and records. Record it, hold it, label it, alphabetize it. Fiddle around with the device to make it faster, slower, reverse, whatever. Scratch the record like a DJ.
I know all this stuff can be done digitally, but that takes all the magic out of it.
A lot of them used the Captain Crunch cereal box whistle. This would emit a 2600 hz tone that basically allowed you to root phone switches, until 1980 when the telcos stopped using in-band signaling. Mostly for free service, but you could maliciously degrade the network if you felt like it.
However, until the mid-1990s, they still used in-band signaling to register payment at payphones, so you could swap out a certain diode in a generic phone dialer in order to spoof coin-drops and get free service, including long distance.
Speaking of that… another thing my kids will never understand: “the long distance bill was $250 this month, you need to start writing letters or find a girlfriend closer to home.” yeah I liked talking on the phone.
Comic books went from 10¢ to 12¢. I wasn’t made of money!
Oh yes, sugar cubes! They disappeared so long ago that I’d forgotten that I miss them.
I suspect you can still find them if you hunt hard enough (whoops, just saw enipla’s later comment which confirms that); but that used to be what you standardly got at restaurants – diners included – and some people had them at home.
And it was cheaper to call after 5PM, and cheaper yet after 11PM. I do not miss being woken up by late calls for a housemate, who never was the one woken up by the phone when his mother called during the cheaper night hours.
Come to think of it, current kids won’t understand why a phone call for him would wake up someone in a different bedroom or why that person had to get up and go downstairs to shut up the ringing.
Heh, when people come to visit and we take them out to see the horses, they always want to give them sugar cubes. That’s just a trope. We have “horse treats” for people to give.
They are indeed still available for purchase, but seem to be far less popular than in the days of yore - so much so that at present, many restaurants simply don’t keep them around. Wonder what happened?
Regional weekly horror shows with outlandish hosts.
They ran late-night Saturdays on local TV stations. The shows opened with creepy music and the hosts would engage in over-the-top acting with props and a few macabre gags, until presenting that evening’s B&W, horror B-movie (sometimes a creepy double feature).The cheesier, the better.
For me (Philly), it started with Roland/Zacherley, then later, Dr. Shock (gas cylinder truck driver by day; horror show host by night) and his toddler daughter, Bubbles.
Bust out the popcorn, and turn off the lights, this was must-see TV for pre-adolescent kids.
Uncle Ted! Edwin Raub - Wikipedia
Re sugar cubes. I’ve always presumed that they’re less popular because of health reasons. Nowadays people are more reluctant to eat something that others have touched. This is less of a problem with packets.
Another possibility is price. I would imagine that a cube of pure sugar is less expensive to produce than making a paper bag, printing stuff on it, filling it precisely, and sealing it – but I could easily be wrong.
Would you rather eat something that’s been left out for an unknown length of time, potentially picked up, dropped, licked by small children, crawled on by ants, or something straight from a sealed pack? Plus you can’t easily add half a sugar cube to stuff.
I have actually worked at both a holiday site and a cafe that used them within the last 5 years- for the holiday site we’d just leave a small number for the guests inside the individual cottages as part of the setup for them to have a drink when they arrived, and we’d never leave any between weeks. Fair enough, IMO. In the cafe, I definitely saw plenty of grubby little fingers rummaging through, and though I did try to keep them hygienic, I only used the ones from behind the counter for my drinks… Ick.
Aren’t/weren’t sugar cubes in American cafés packed into paper? In Germany, they are, always by two pieces, like this:
ETA: I just noticed the funny name for American ears. so chuckle away. But that was totally unintended 
.
… and then to 15 cents. Then 20 cents, then 25 cents, and finally more!
If they were used in retaurants and diners, the cubes were packed in paper. But you can still buy unpackaged Domino Sugar “Dots”
https://www.amazon.com/Domino-Sugar-1-lb/dp/B01GHECFX2/ref=asc_df_B01GHECFX2/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459577931696&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17871186598648147460&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001907&hvtargid=pla-944927574631&th=1
Oh sure, that’s the same here in Germany. I was wondering why some posters pointed to the unsanitary aspect of loose sugar cubes, and thought that was an issue in restaurants too.
yep, I recall restaurants with a bowl of loose sugar cubes on the table. (In U.S.)