Back in the day, when I was a college student in Germany, I was amazed to find half-liter bottles of beer for sale on the street 24/7, in large "automats." This was especially handy on Saturdays, when stores usually closed right after lunch! Elsewhere I've been taken by the clever practice of having fresh cut flowers available in an automat... right across the street from a cemetery. And, of course, condom machines are ubiquitous.
But until coming to Belgium I don't recall ever seeing bread for sale on the street, again in a glass-and-plastic automat. You throw in your 2 or 3 Euros, and out comes a fresh loaf of one of many different kinds of bread. Where the beer machine was a life saver on Saturday evenings, the bread machine comes in very handy early on a Sunday morning.
By the way, if you read the little sign at the bottom of the picture and are wondering, "pain" is not a cognate - in French, it means bread!
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