Money trolley cups in stores

[wallypop]

Remember clerks sending payment, and receiving change in overhead trolley cup (Usually leather) ? Only the "account manager collected money!

 

[3fingers]

Two or three of our local stores had brass pneumatic tubes. Brass carrier tube with leather seals on the ends as well. Very ornate fixtures holding them to the wall.
I was endlessly fascinated as a child watching the clerk put the handwritten ticket and your money in the tube and send it upstairs and shortly the carrier returned with ticket and change. I can still hear the sound it made.

 

[Fading Fast]

Two or three of our local stores had brass pneumatic tubes. Brass carrier tube with leather seals on the ends as well. Very ornate fixtures holding them to the wall.
I was endlessly fascinated as a child watching the clerk put the handwritten ticket and your money in the tube and send it upstairs and shortly the carrier returned with ticket and change. I can still hear the sound it made.

One of my summer jobs on Wall Street was working in the "wire room" where all the orders would come into the trading desks. The paper orders from the "board room -" where the stockbrokers worked would come in via a belt-and-track system if they were close by or via pneumatic tubes if far away or on another floor.

Basically, I spent my day shuffling between the "belt" orders and the "tube" orders as I had to grab them as soon as the came in and distribute them, via a separate belt-and-track system, to the appropriate trading desk and, then, when filled, send them back out via the tubes or belts to the brokers.

It was complicated for a month or so until you learned all the proper places and some other nuances of the system; after that, it was just a matter of handling the volume of orders which could get crazy.

I loved the physical creativity of both systems. Looking back, it's amazing how that was state-of-the-art technology in the mid-'80s, but by the early '90s, almost all firms had moved to "end-to-end" computer ticketing. In the '80s, the executed orders were, then, inputted into computer systems for processing, but the actual flow of the ticket until execution was as described.