Located in the basement of a department store in Kawasaki, Japan, the world’s smallest escalator only has five steps and measures 83.4 centimeters (32.8 inches).

The escalator is one of humanity’s most useful inventions, allowing people to effortlessly travel between floors in places where elevators would be impractical, but the world’s smallest escalator is actually a useless oddity that holds no real purpose than to claim the Guinness record for the world’s smallest escalator. Known as the ‘Petitcalator’ or ‘Puchicalator’, this unusual contraption is located in the basement of More’s Department Store in the city of Kawasaki and is considered more of a tourist attraction than a useful piece of technology. Yes, it’s useable, but it measures just 83.4 centimeters so it offers no real benefit to whoever is riding it over traditional stairs.

When Kawasaki’s More opened in 1989, its designers wanted to connect its underground level to that of the adjacent Azalea underground shopping center, but they weren’t perfectly aligned, so even though the difference in levels wasn’t that great, they decided to implement a set of conventional stairs and a small escalator. Only that small escalator ended up shorter than originally planned because of a design oversight.

While deciding how to implement the escalator, designers realized that there was a huge concrete beam where the motor was supposed to go, but instead of scrapping the escalator idea entirely, they just decided to go with a smaller one that ended up becoming the smallest in the world, a title it has managed to hold on to for over three decades now.

 

Interestingly, the world’s smallest escalator failed to fulfill its original purpose of connecting the floors of the two adjacent shopping centers. Instead, it just connects to a short set of conventional steps making it virtually useless. Still, it used to be even more so until about eight years ago, when it was switched from a downward escalator to an upward escalator, meaning you can actually use it to climb 83.4 centimeters on its five moving steps…