Word: minimart
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What's 18 ft. wide, fully automated and open 24 hours a day? Despite its name (which already seems a little out of date), the Shop 2000 is the cutting edge of robotic retail: a vending machine with the inventory of a minimart. The coin-and credit-card-operated vendor carries up to 200 items, from olive oil to computer discs to sandwiches to toothpaste (storing the perishables at a frosty 35°F). There's no smile with your service, but you do get the fun of watching a robotic arm grab your purchase. With convenience stores reporting a shortage...
With distribution centers in five cities--Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington D.C.--and more in the works, Park and Kang's website now boasts an inventory that includes some 15,000 videos for rental and purchase, DVDs, video games and a "minimart" of snack foods...
...distant future, Harvard students will encounter a new, but altogether familiar minimart on the corner of John F. Kennedy and Mt. Auburn Streets...
...Lorain, Ohio, a racially mixed, economically strained town of 70,000, are looking for explanations. They are talking about the growing gang violence, the drug syndicates from New York City and Detroit that use Lorain as a drop point, the 11-year-old boy who held up a minimart at gunpoint last September and turned out to have had 46 previous encounters with the police. The townspeople, especially the young, "don't believe there's a future," says school superintendent Thomas Bollin. "At least they don't act like they believe there's a future...
Reidy's minicart sold mostly by word of mouth until he found the right check-out line at last year's International Gift Fair in New York. Maybe you can't take it to a minimart, but with a plastic liner, the chrome-plated version can be used as a wine cooler, a salad bowl or even a purse. Reidy says some Rolls-Royce dealers give the 24-carat gold-plated model to upscale Santas, who use it to deliver a set of car keys. Sales so far: 15,000. If you can afford it, check...
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