By Bret Schulte and Don Oldenburg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 30, 2002; Page C01

The big automated convenience store in Adams Morgan has only been there two weeks, but word is out. By noon yesterday a mob of media swarmed the large steel and glass machine. Cameras rolled, mikes were poised, reporters scratched at their notepads. Only one thing was missing: the customers.

A woman in a new silver Honda drove by and shouted an often-unprintable description of the machine. Other passersby regarded the contraption -- possibly the future of the corner store -- from a safe distance, staring through the glass at rows of milk jugs, snack food and toiletries waiting to be dispensed, with no clerks or cashiers needed. The thing resembles part ATM, part candy machine on steroids, and carries the label Tik Tok Easy Shop.

It's a masterpiece of convenience in the drive-through age. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, then, to learn that the Tik Tok Easy Shop is actually a division of the people who spawned fast food and helped put a happy face on the exporting of American culture: McDonald's.

According to company spokeswoman Lisa Howard, McDonald's Corp. hasn't made its involvement known because the machine is "just a small test. We don't want to create an expectation on the part of the consumer."

Not to mention that it might like to avoid any negative reaction by the consumer. The Easy Shop is the first of its kind in this country, though variations of it have existed in Europe for some years. Since it materialized Aug. 14 on the corner of 18th Street and California Avenue NW, in a parking lot next to a row of businesses, neighbors have responded with resounding disunity.

One group of teenagers called it "cool" and bought 20-ounce sodas for $1.25 each. They said they'd continue to patronize the machine, if circumstances warranted: "There's some stuff in there you might not want to buy in a store," said one, who gestured to a pack of condoms.

Others aren't so thrilled. Alan Roth, of the Adams Morgan Advisory Neighborhood Commission, says: "It just appeared one day. This big ugly silver box plopped down on this concrete slab."

Immediately Roth was hit with phone calls and e-mail from constituents and neighbors. "The vast majority of them -- all but one -- complained that the thing is unsightly, ugly and dangerous to traffic and pedestrian safety, because they anticipated people would be pulling up along 18th Street and jumping out of their cars, making purchases, and that's already a congested area," he says. "And this is generally not the kind of operation they wanted in the neighborhood, where they'd rather support local businesses."

Of course, who would call or e-mail the advisory neighborhood commission to report being thrilled with something?

In the course of an hour yesterday, several people approached the 18-foot-wide refrigerated box, but few if any hazarded a transaction that would send a large, mechanical scoop to fetch them milk or potato chips, diapers or paper towels -- all with the promise of avoiding, you know, people.

A Rockville couple on their way to lunch stopped to stare for a while at the rows of products. "I'm not sure I would use it," concluded Tom Woodall. "If you got a 7-Eleven close by, it'd be easier to step into the market than go to this."

It may appear daunting, but the machine works with surprising ease. You slip in cash, change or a credit card, and follow the instructions on a touch screen. Just as with the vending machines in the lunchroom, you punch in the number of the desired item, be it Oreos or tampons. Prices are generally rounded off, and large sums of change are made with $1 coins.

It's the latest achievement in technology's dubious quest to eliminate the human in human interaction. The machine is robotic, precise, odor-free and utterly without attitude.

An indignant Adams Morgan resident, Michael Rogers, dispersed an angry e-mail yesterday calling on "friends, neighbors and elected officials" to "Stop the Box."

Many have responded to his call. Ward 1 D.C. Council member Jim Graham pulled up to "the Box" in his Saab just after noon yesterday.

Graham expressed displeasure with the aesthetics of the Tik Tok Easy Shop -- but was mostly surprised it was there at all. "It seems like it was dropped on us from outer space," he said. "As the council member of this ward, I received no proper notification."

McDonald's did file for a permit to operate the Easy Shop as a vending machine, though Graham says the company did not make any announcements in the press or at advisory neighborhood meetings.

Known as Shop 2000 to the woman who created it, the automatic convenience store was the brainchild of Hettie Herzog, president and owner of Automated Distribution Technologies, in Exton, Pa.

Herzog says she got the idea while traveling in Europe, where similar machines have existed for decades. She tried to court European manufacturers, but "they aren't interested in the American market," she says.

Over the past four or five years, Herzog designed and built her own prototype, the Shop 2000. Last summer, she tested the market by planting her device near a gas station in York, Pa., but removed it because "it wasn't generating the amount of sales you need."

The Adams Morgan Shop 2000, however, is a different story, she says: "It's generating a lot of foot traffic out there." But this is only a test. Herzog is letting McDonald's try out the machine for three to six months. If sales figures cut the mustard, McDonald's may then buy it and operate it.

So far, things are going well. Says Howard, its McSpokeswoman: "Certainly judging by all the media and customer reaction so far, it's being very well received."

Howard won't discuss sales. Or McDonald's sudden interest in the convenience store business, except to say that "we're always looking at new ideas and innovations, and this automated convenience store is the latest example of that."

McDonald's has also established about a dozen vending machines around the Washington area that rent movies on DVD. All of those are in McDonald's parking lots, except the one in Adams Morgan, which sits alongside the Easy Shop.

The DVD machine operates with a credit card only, and carries about 180 classic and recently released films. Like the Big Box next to it, the DVD rental machine is open 24 hours a day. And a film can be yours for less than the price of a Big Mac. At Adams Morgan, a day's rental goes for $1.59. If you keep it longer, it charges an additional $1.59 to your card.

If you don't bring back the disc after a week, you'll find the retail price of the movie charged to your account. Do not try to argue. The machine will not hear your pleas.

McDonald's as purveyor of instant, automated, convenient items makes a kind of sense. The company revolutionized the food service industry by applying to the American meal something akin to Henry Ford's conveyor-belt production system. It perfected not only the french fry, but the system that serves it up the fastest. McDonald's is a machine in and of itself, one that spread around the globe before you could say "Want fries with that?"

While Arun Dev, who stocks the Easy Shop in Adams Morgan, says reaction has been "99 percent positive," several residents are making their voices heard about the large, silent presence in their neighborhood.

Rogers is concerned about the human toll an automated store will have on his community. "People need to know that when they shop at that box, they are giving money to McDonald's and taking away jobs from the neighborhood," he says. "I think of Video Americain, a small little video shop across the street that stays open late to rent movies and employs neighborhood teens and struggles to make it -- and now they have to compete with this machine? My heart really breaks for them."

Meanwhile, Graham is pursuing the question of the proper permits and zoning for the brave new machine. The D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which issues permits, has decided that it erred in authorizing McDonald's a permit to operate the Easy Shop as a vending machine.

Notes Theresa Lewis, deputy director of DCRA: "The concept and actual structure do not meet what we call a vending machine. It houses machinery. It can be used for storage. It has a foundation and a support."

So the machine may not be allowed to occupy its current site in the satellite parking lot of Lauriol Plaza, a South American restaurant on 18th Street. Lewis said her department would recommend such a relocation, and she plans to serve McDonald's a notice by today, ordering it to reapply for a permit as a "structure."

However things end in Adams Morgan, an automated future seems to be all but guaranteed.

Professor Sherry Turkle, founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, puts the Easy Shop in the larger context of yesteryear's automats and delivery orders via the Internet. But, she says, this is different both in its total automation and its sidewalk location.

"There are so many movements trying to make every street corner into an urban park with a mime and a juggler," she says, "and at the same time, somebody said, 'Let's create a wall of prepackaged commodity.' That these transactions belong on our urban sidewalk . . . I find that is the innovation."

But, she adds, "I wouldn't want it."

Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., calls the Easy Shop "the wave of the future."

"Think about it: You go into a convenience store to get something and isn't it a treat to wait in line behind people paying for gas and buying cigarettes and lottery tickets so you can buy your half-and-half and a roll of toilet paper?"

As for the dehumanizing effects of our faceless, impersonable future? "This is 'Modern Times,' " Celente says. "Charlie Chaplin went through that. People are already dehumanized.

"And it's not like you're dealing with a real human being in convenience stores anyway."