Pizza ATM Is the Automated Fast Food America Deserves

Cincinnati, home of culinary innovations like putting chili and about a pound of cheese on spaghetti, now has the only ATM in America that spits out pizzas.

According to Cincinnati.com, the forward-thinkers at Xavier University have placed the machine in the common area of a dorm. When it gets switched on sometime in the next few weeks, it will extrude piping-hot, disk-shaped items that will apparently meet the accepted definition of "pizza."

Jennifer Paiotti, a marketer for student services at Xavier, told a local TV news station, "It is the best pizza I've ever had, and I hate to admit that as a New Yorker." It's a shocking admission, but it's easy to believe the pizzas will at least be palatable. Even Little Caesar's $5 Hot and Ready Pizzas—some of which are available near Xavier University—will fill the food void when you're in college, and those have usually been fermenting in an oven all day by the time you eat them. In contrast, ATM pizzas will be baked-to-order.

And unlike food from one of Cincinnati's many pizzerias, which often require customers to endure tyrannies like "saying words to people" and "making eye contact," the oven-fresh, Italian-flavored objects available from the Xavier's Pizza ATM can be purchased without anyone witnessing your shame, any time, day or night.

The ATM—reportedly the first of its kind on US soil—will be loaded with 70 uncooked pizzas per day. They'll be stored in a refrigerator onboard until someone orders via touchscreen. Once that happens, it will trigger a complex chain reaction involving inside the ATM that will eventually spit a pizza through a hole for you after three minutes.

It's probably worth noting that the pizza ATM doesn't seem to actually dispense money along with the pizza, so this is probably more of a vending machine and less "automated teller machine," but whatever.

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