Such a badly written title.

I read that thinking, yeah it sounds dystopian but who has coins, and found out:

1. Most of them aren't coin operated.
2. It sounds like they're getting less common.

Should have called it "the rise and fall of pay-to-use elevators".

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department

Coin-operated elevators sounds like a libertarian paradise!

Lots of Americans have watched the Wallace and Gromit shows and movies.

Probably, fewer of them understand that the robotic moon-dwelling antagonist in A Grand Day Out was a coin-operated heating and cooking appliance, modeled after the sort that actually existed and operated in post-War Britain.

I'm not in favor of coin-op elevators. But there are precedents. The ownership class will nickel-and-dime you to death if they think they can. They view the rest of us as a resource to be strip-mined.

A useful side effect: people started walking more.

The reason that a lot of European cities are about four or five stories is because prior to the elevator, that's about how high people were willing to climb.

If you live on the tenth floor of a building, say, an elevator is really more than an optional luxury.

Coins are becoming less common

No. They are not.

Well I've heard of a Coin operated boy but not an elevator.

Next up: Slide your card to use the shitter.

There is a bin store in my town and it pulls in about 400 or more customers a day. At least on $12 and $1 days. With so many people wanting to use his toilet and his water tax increasing, the owner installed a pay toilet. Of course people were taping over the lock so he stationed a security guy by the door. Now customers are going out behind his building to do their business and you can smell it as you drive up. Who carries change? I don't even shop at stores that require me to insert a quarter for a cart. Anyway, a rounded backward key works. My sister now carries spare keys with her and I told her she could just as easily carry quarters but it is the principle. I just don't shop there, on principle. I also don't shop at membership clubs. If BJ's, Sams or Costco wants my money, they have to pay me to come in. Otherwise, it is bin stores and farmers markets for me.

I would be happy to take the stairs, so long as that thing was smashed off the wall.

I like people in gym clothes who get off on the 2nd or third floor.

Thank god for the Americans with Disabilities Act cause they'd already be doing it in the US if they could.