Remember the old Horn & Hardart Automat? This entrepreneur doesn’t, but he wants to bring it back anyway.
More recently, one of those entrepreneurs, Al Mazzone, a West Chester tech executive and Army veteran, started selling H&H coffee online in 2017. Mazzone, 70 then, was not interested in reopening the Automat. He knew that the dwindling ranks of Automat fans were not in his demographic favor.That is, until five years ago when Mazzone met Arena at a seminar for military entrepreneurs.
“Obviously, I don’t think that every restaurant in the world should be self-service,” he said. “If I’m sitting in a coffee shop for more than a little bit and I want another item, I usually just don’t even do it because I don’t want to wait in line again. But if you’re sitting in a coffee shop and it’s like, ‘Oh, I could just go up to that window with my credit card and get that coffee cake out of there.’ That’s a nice feature, too.
But in the 1950s, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains came along with their stacks of premade, paper-wrapped burgers and drive-thrus, and ate H&H’s lunch.