For instance, think about the ATM, which became popular in the 1970s. Most customers no longer needed to talk to a teller inside a bank’s branch office. Many people assumed that this would eliminate the teller job altogether. Right? Wrong.[1364] Thanks to the ATM, banks needed fewer human tellers in their branches. But this made branches cheaper to operate, which led to banks opening more branches. And that, in turn, led banks to employ more tellers.
