Time Machine

Counter and rental clerks

Name: Counter and Rental Clerks: employment and wages since 1926
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Also called Rental clerk, Counter clerk, Car rental agent, Equipment rental clerk, Rental agent

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 400,810 US counter and rental clerks, with median pay of $41,300 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 473,090, in May 2005. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 3,000 from 1926, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for counter and rental clerks: Mobile check-in, contactless apps, and IoT fleet management, 2015 to 2025.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

67.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Counter and rental clerks: jobs and pay since 1926 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-2021

Chicago

Future History. "Counter and rental clerks: jobs and pay since 1926." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-2021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_41_2021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Counter and rental clerks: jobs and pay since 1926}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-2021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

1925195019752000now

Country

2026

Known then as Rent-a-Car Attendant / Livery Clerk (early automobile rental era)

Known then as Rental Agent / Counter Attendant (post-war rental industry formation)

Known then as Rental Clerk / Counter Clerk (equipment rental, video store, and car rental expansion era)

Known then as Rental Sales Representative / Counter Associate (customer-service rebranding era)

Known then as Counter and Rental Clerks (BLS SOC 41-2021)

Known today as Counter and Rental Clerks (BLS SOC 41-2021)

Projected to still be called Counter and Rental Clerks (BLS SOC 41-2021)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

401K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$41,300

Est.

≈ $40,241 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1918

September 1918: Walter L. Jacobs, 22 years old, opens a car rental operation in Chicago with about a dozen Ford Model T vehicles. By 1923 the business is generating more than $1 million in annual revenues. John Hertz, owner of Yellow Cab Manufacturing, purchases the company in 1923 and names it Hertz Drive-Ur-Self. The Hertz counter agent -- greeting travelers at the door, explaining rental terms, handing over keys -- becomes the archetype of the counter and rental clerk role for the next century.

Beat · 1946

Warren Avis launches Avis Airlines Rent A Car at Willow Run Airport, Ypsilanti, Michigan -- the first car rental counter inside an airport terminal. He expands to Miami and Chicago within two years. The airport counter model fundamentally changes the counter agent's work environment: instead of a downtown street-corner operation, clerks now work in the middle of a transportation hub, processing customers arriving from flights, under time pressure, with luggage in hand and plans already committed. The airport counter becomes the canonical counter-and-rental-clerk workplace for the next seventy years.

Beat · 1955

March 6, 1955: Leonard Hawk gathers 21 rental store operators in Moline, Illinois to form what becomes the American Rental Association -- the first trade organization for the equipment rental industry. At the time rental stores were a quickly growing industry serving homeowners and small contractors. The founding formalized standards, shared inventory knowledge, and eventually drove professionalization of the counter-and-rental clerk role in the equipment vertical. The ARA would grow to represent over 11,000 member locations in North America.

Beat · 1977

December 1977: George Atkinson opens Video Station in Los Angeles, the first professionally managed video rental store in the US. He charges $50 for a membership card and $10 per night per tape. The format catches on rapidly: by mid-1985 there are 15,000 video rental outlets, and by 1988 roughly 70,000. The video rental counter clerk -- recommending films, checking for rewind, enforcing the "be kind, rewind" norm, and absorbing customer frustration about late fees -- becomes a defining American service-sector figure of the 1980s and 1990s.

Beat · 1985

Blockbuster Video opens its first store in Dallas, Texas in 1985. Unlike independent video stores, Blockbuster used a proprietary database to track inventory, standardized store layout, and ran on a corporate franchise model. This industrialized the video rental counter clerk role: instead of a cinephile with personal recommendations, the typical Blockbuster associate was trained to scan barcodes, process transactions in the POS system, and upsell memberships. Blockbuster's growth trajectory -- from zero to 9,094 stores worldwide and 84,300 employees by 2004 -- created the largest single employer of counter and rental clerks in US history.

Beat · 2010

September 23, 2010: Blockbuster files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with $900 million in debt. The proximate causes: Netflix's 2007 streaming launch, Redbox's $1-per-night DVD kiosks eating into impulse rentals, and the company's own $1.6 billion in debt from a failed acquisition spree. The filing marks the effective end of the video rental counter clerk as a mass occupation. Over the following eleven years every major video rental chain closes: Movie Gallery (2010), Blockbuster brand acquired by Dish Network (2011), Hollywood Video (2010), and finally Family Video (January 2021). The counter clerk job that existed in 70,000 locations in 1988 is reduced to a handful of independent curiosities.

Beat · 2025

April 2025: Hertz deploys UVeye AI damage-detection scanners across US airport rental locations. The system drives vehicles through a photo-booth tunnel, captures thousands of images, and flags damage automatically -- replacing the manual walk-around inspection that had been a counter agent's closing ritual since 1916. More than 675,000 Hertz rentals are scanned; more than 97% show no billable damage. The AI system generates the report; the counter agent reviews disputed findings and explains the determination to the customer. The Hertz-UVeye deployment is the most concrete 2025 data point for how AI transforms the counter and rental clerk role: it does not eliminate the job but reassigns the physical inspection task to a machine and concentrates human time on the exceptions.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1916

In 1916 a Nebraska man named Joe Saunders decided to do something practical with his Ford Model T: lend it out to businessmen passing through Omaha who needed ground transportation. He bolted a mileage meter to the front wheel and charged ten cents per mile, and his idea worked. By 1917 he had eighteen Model Ts on the road. What Saunders created was not just a business but a new kind of job: the rental counter agent, a person whose entire value proposition was knowing an inventory of machines, explaining their operation to strangers, handling payment, and getting the asset back in usable condition. Two years after Saunders, Walter L. Jacobs opened a similar operation in Chicago in September 1918 with about a dozen Model T Fords and turned it into a million-dollar enterprise by 1923 before selling to John Hertz, who gave his name to what became one of the largest rental chains in the world. Avis followed in 1946 at Detroit's Willow Run Airport, becoming the first counter to sit inside an airport terminal -- a move that wired the rental counter into the physical fabric of air travel for the next eight decades. The equipment side of the trade grew from different roots: surplus military equipment after World War II created a stockpile of tools and machinery that entrepreneurs could rent to the wave of Americans building new suburban homes in the 1950s. By 1955, twenty-one operators had gathered in Moline, Illinois to form the American Rental Association, formalizing what had been a loose collection of neighborhood tool-and-party stores into a recognized industry. The video rental store appeared last, born in Los Angeles in December 1977 when George Atkinson opened Video Station and demonstrated that consumers would pay to take a film home for the night. By the mid-1980s the US had roughly 25,000 video rental outlets. The common thread across all three verticals -- cars, equipment, video -- was the same: a counter, a clerk, an asset check-out, a return, and the human judgment required to bridge the gap between the two.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace counter and rental clerks? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+3%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 41-2021 (Counter and rental clerks): 409.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 421.9 thousand in 2035, a change of +12.4 thousand (+3.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.3% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

67.7%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 41-2021.00 Counter and Rental Clerks. Shown: human-rated β = 0.677, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.548 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.806; GPT-4-rated β 0.532. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for counter and rental clerks

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereRespond to in-person and phone reservation requests for vehicles, equipment, or services

Respond to in-person and phone reservation requests for vehicles, equipment, or services; check real-time availability in the rental management system; provide pricing, policies, and add-on options; and confirm bookings with customers while the AI chatbot handles routine digital inquiries.^[6],[9],[1]

Tools picking this up

Booqable ↗Anolla AI Rental Consultant ↗

Where your edge is

Focus on reservation scenarios the AI cannot close: walk-in customers with special requirements, fleet reallocation during peak demand, and bundled add-on upsells. Develop working knowledge of the chatbot's escalation triggers so you can pick up handoffs without restarting the customer's context.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate rental agreements and calculate charges using the rental management platform

Generate rental agreements and calculate charges using the rental management platform; process credit card payments and security deposits; and resolve payment exceptions -- declined cards, invoice disputes, and prorated early-return calculations -- that the automated billing flow cannot handle without judgment.^[5],[12],[1]

Tools picking this up

Booqable ↗Point of Rental ↗

Where your edge is

Own the exception layer: learn the billing logic well enough to audit automated invoices for common errors (wrong rate tier, missing waiver, incorrect duration). Customers who dispute charges at the counter need a clerk who can explain the line items clearly and resolve the issue on the spot.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor real-time inventory status in the rental management platform

Monitor real-time inventory status in the rental management platform; conduct periodic physical spot-checks to reconcile the digital record against actual on-lot availability; flag overdue returns and coordinate with dispatch on reallocation decisions when demand exceeds available fleet.^[7],[10]

Tools picking this up

Point of Rental ↗Booqable ↗

Where your edge is

Treat the software dashboard as a starting point, not the final word. Unrecorded damage, unreported early returns, and misplaced equipment create gaps between digital and physical inventory. Frequent physical spot-checks -- especially before peak-demand periods -- catch the discrepancies that create customer complaints and revenue leakage.

Where counter and rental clerks go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Customer Service Representatives
US median pay
$44,770 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
-5.3%
Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
US median pay
$44,390 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+2.5%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Customer Service Representatives

Counter and rental clerks already perform the core tasks of customer service: handling complaints, answering product questions, resolving billing disputes, and managing service recovery. Transitioning to a dedicated customer service role -- especially in a contact center or omnichannel support team -- requires virtually no additional credential. The pivot gains CRI stability because customer service representatives are more distributed across industries (healthcare, software, utilities, financial services) than rental-sector clerks, reducing concentration risk as kiosk check-in erodes rental counter headcount.

What you'd add

· CRM platform proficiency (Salesforce Service Cloud or Zendesk)
· Ticket-based support workflows and escalation procedures
· Written communication for chat and email support channels
· De-escalation techniques for multi-channel (phone, chat, email) interactions

What it takesMost of your skills carry over

Tools of the era

How has the work of counter and rental clerks changed since 1916?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Paper ledger and mileage meter (hand-written rental contract era)
The first rental counter agents worked with the simplest possible tools: a mileage meter bolted to a wheel, a paper ledger, and a cash drawer. Joe Saunders charged ten cents per mile and kept a handwritten record of each transaction. Rental agreements were simple, typed or hand-filled carbon-copy contracts that the customer signed and the clerk retained. The counter agent's expertise was entirely embodied: knowing the fleet, explaining how to drive a stick-shift Model T, collecting the car at the agreed time, and resolving disputes about mileage readings by hand. No technology mediated these judgments.
Airport counter terminal and carbon-copy rental agreement (air travel expansion era)
Warren Avis put the first car rental counter inside an airport in 1946 at Willow Run in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and then at Miami and Chicago. The innovation restructured the counter agent's workflow around air travel rhythms: plane arrivals created burst demand, queues formed, and the speed of processing each counter transaction became a competitive differentiator. Standardized carbon-copy rental agreements -- the "contract set" that became universal across Hertz, Avis, National, and Budget by the 1960s -- allowed clerks to complete a rental in a consistent, audit-ready format without managing paper ledgers. The counter agent's pace and accuracy became central to the customer experience in a way the original Saunders model had never required.
VHS cassette and video rental store counter (home video revolution)
George Atkinson opened the first US video rental store in Los Angeles in December 1977, and by mid-1985 there were 15,000 video rental outlets in the country. The video rental counter clerk became one of the most culturally visible iterations of the counter-and-rental role: the person who recommended films, explained the difference between VHS and Beta (a distinction that mattered acutely through the early 1980s), enforced late fees, and processed returns with a rewind check. By 1988 roughly 70,000 video rental outlets existed across the US. The video clerk's knowledge base was the film catalog itself -- a form of expertise that chains like Blockbuster (founded 1985) both systematized (through proprietary database software) and, over time, commoditized by replacing cinephile clerks with teenagers managing standardized inventory. At its peak Blockbuster employed 84,300 workers worldwide.
Effect on the work
The video rental sector added more than a hundred thousand counter and rental clerk jobs at its peak in the late 1990s. The entire segment was eliminated by streaming and Redbox kiosks between 2005 and 2021, representing one of the most complete technology-driven occupational contraction events in modern US service history.
Computer reservation and rental management systems (IBM mainframe to PC era)
Car rental chains adopted IBM mainframe-based reservation systems through the 1970s and 1980s, moving fleet allocation and booking confirmation from paper logs to electronic records. By the early 1990s, PC-based rental management systems had reached equipment rental stores, replacing handwritten inventory ledgers with real-time availability tracking. For the counter agent this change was transformative: a clerk could now check fleet availability across multiple locations, confirm reservations in seconds, and generate a printed contract automatically. The expertise required shifted from memorizing a physical inventory toward accurate data entry and navigation of the reservation software -- the first step in the long transition from craft knowledge toward platform fluency that defines the modern counter role.
Online booking and loyalty kiosk programs (Hertz Gold, Avis Preferred)
Hertz launched its "Gold" frequent-renter program and began allowing pre-registered members to bypass the main counter and pick up a car directly from the lot. Avis Preferred followed a similar model. These programs did not eliminate counter agents but bifurcated demand: loyalty members went around the counter; first-time or infrequent renters and complex transactions remained at it. By the mid-2000s, major car rental chains also deployed self-service kiosks in some airport locations for reservation holders. Hertz introduced its ExpressRent kiosk in November 2011, allowing customers to complete a rental from a live video-chat agent outside of normal business hours. The effect was incremental displacement of counter intake for straightforward transactions, concentrating human counter time on exceptions and new customers.
Effect on the work
Hertz's kiosk rollout (ExpressRent, 2011-2012) covered many markets by 2012. The direct employment effect on counter headcount at car rental companies is not precisely documented in public sources, but the Gold bypass and kiosk programs together reduced the volume of standard transactions handled at counters without eliminating counter positions -- the service remained available for travelers who needed it.
DVD vending kiosks (Redbox, 2004-2024)
McDonald's founded Redbox in 2002 as an automated convenience store concept; by 2004 it had pivoted to DVD rental kiosks. At its peak, Redbox operated more than 34,000 kiosks across the US and controlled more than half the domestic DVD rental market. The video store counter clerk did not adapt; the job simply ceased to exist as a format. Redbox itself ceased operations in August 2024, displaced by streaming video on demand.
Effect on the work
Redbox kiosks and Netflix streaming together ended the video rental store segment entirely. By 2017, over 86% of the US video rental stores open in 2007 had closed. Family Video, the last major chain, closed all remaining stores in January 2021. The more than a hundred thousand counter and rental clerk positions in video rental were eliminated without meaningful migration to other counter formats.
Mobile check-in, contactless apps, and IoT fleet management (Hertz, Enterprise mobile apps)
Major car rental chains deployed mobile apps enabling customers to complete the entire intake process before arriving at a rental location: selecting the vehicle, signing the agreement digitally, and picking up from a designated spot without visiting a counter. Enterprise and Hertz both offered mobile-native check-in by 2017-2018. For equipment rental, platforms like Booqable and Point of Rental brought online booking and automated contract generation to the small-operator market. The counter agent's role shifted further toward exception handling, physical vehicle handoff for app-confused customers, upselling insurance and upgrades, and resolving discrepancies between the digital booking and physical fleet availability. The job became less about intake and more about service recovery.
AI chatbots and damage-detection AI (Anolla, UVeye, Rybo, InTempo AI)
AI rental chatbots handle up to 79.3% of routine rental queries without human intervention -- availability checks, quotes, booking confirmations, extensions, and cancellations (Anolla benchmark, 2024). Hertz deployed UVeye's AI damage-detection scanners across US airport locations in April 2025, automatically capturing thousands of images per vehicle and flagging damage without a manual walk-around. InTempo Software reports AI-driven predictive maintenance reducing unplanned equipment downtime by 20-50%. For the counter agent, the AI wave concentrates work on the tasks machines cannot complete: in-person damage disputes, equipment orientation walk-arounds, identity-document edge cases, upsell conversations that require reading a customer, and service recovery when the digital system has failed. The Gitnux 2026 rental industry benchmarks show 1.8x faster resolution of complex cases and 80% less manual data entry where AI tools are deployed -- gains that reduce clerk transaction volume without eliminating the role.
Effect on the work
The remaining counter workforce is expected to concentrate in equipment rental, specialty rental, and high-value vehicle segments rather than commodity car rental.

Part of Sales · see all 18 roles →

Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Counter and Rental Clerks employment and pay by year

On record since1916

Latest US employment400,810 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$41,300 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

United Kingdom (UK SOC 7219)
Employment, 2025
299,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 7219 Customer service occupations n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
Median pay, 2025
£24,438, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 7219 Customer service occupations n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Australia (ANZSCO 6219)
Employment, 2025
12,500, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 6219 Other Sales Assistants and Salespersons, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
Median pay, 2025
A$68,536, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,318 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.

View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1926	3,000	n/a	Est., Car Rental Express Researched context	Report
1960	50,000	$3,200	Est., Rental Equipment Register (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched context	Report
1985	250,000	n/a	Est., Wikipedia Researched context	Report
2000	540,000	$18,400	Est., Wikipedia (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS (pay) Researched context	Report
2003	442,310	$17,640	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	444,850	$18,280	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	473,090	$18,970	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	468,900	$19,570	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	462,040	$20,070	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	448,480	$20,900	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	416,950	$21,300	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	414,730	$22,100	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	420,070	$22,740	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	432,650	$23,130	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	430,700	$23,370	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	437,610	$23,860	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	447,050	$24,440	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	450,330	$25,550	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	445,530	$25,820	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	426,700	$27,290	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	411,560	$28,820	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	368,300	$30,870	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	371,620	$31,330	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	370,770	$35,830	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	390,300	$37,400	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	398,620	$38,540	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	400,810	$41,300	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/41-2021"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Counter and Rental Clerks, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-2021">Counter and Rental Clerks: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

See all roles in Sales

Where counter and rental clerks go next

Customer Service Representatives

Paper ledger and mileage meter (hand-written rental contract era)Paper ledger1916–1950

Airport counter terminal and carbon-copy rental agreement (air travel expansion era)Airport counter terminal1946–1980

VHS cassette and video rental store counter (home video revolution)VHS cassette1975–1995

Computer reservation and rental management systems (IBM mainframe to PC era)Computer reservation1980–2005

Online booking and loyalty kiosk programs (Hertz Gold, Avis Preferred)Online booking1997–2015

DVD vending kiosks (Redbox, 2004-2024)DVD vending kiosks2002–2024

Mobile check-in, contactless apps, and IoT fleet management (Hertz, Enterprise mobile apps)Mobile check-in2015–2025

AI chatbots and damage-detection AI (Anolla, UVeye, Rybo, InTempo AI)AI chatbots2023–present

Counter and Rental Clerks employment and pay by year

In other countries

More in Sales