I’m fairly certain the Tesco and Sainsburys near me were still using vacuum tubes to send money and receipts up to their back-offices well into the 1990s.

I remember a small local dept. store in the US still using them in the mid-70's.

If you had to take a little boy or few shopping for clothes, the combination of "small, local, has a fascinating pneumatic tube system" was often a winner.

I don't know, there's some good reasons against it on the page. For example, needing to dig up tubing to make repairs.

I think these systems are really cool but it isn't clear that they are net positive. Even today I would suspect many parcels being too heavy or large for the tube system. You might just end up with the tube system AND vehicular delivery.

The issues section noting how big a pain the breakdowns were reminded me of the first hospital I worked at. There was a lab across the street (and a few more of the hospital's buildings/parking lots before that) for processing blood/urine samples and so they put a the tube system in to make things "easier". It didn't break down every week or anything, but when it did... it was chaos.

They also ended up switching to someone just driving a van - which they already had to have ready to go for when the tube system broke down for days at a time anyways.