Going back to the '50's, there was a machine known as the 'Minut-Steak' machine which is the original invention of the minute steak. It was nothing more than a patty-former attached to the head of a grinder; you'd regrind some ground chuck or ground round through your grinder and it would press and flatten the burger into a square patty and push it out onto a waxed paper from a roll underneath in a long strip. You'd lay those out on the block and cleave them into individual square patties, stack and sell out of your meatcase. The waxed paper had "Minut-Steak" written in green lettering on it continuously. Used to have to make tons of 'em on Saturday mornings for the case during the summers.
Then, the idea of a 'minute steak' got transferred to another new invention.. the cube steak machine. Those originally were known as 'minute steaks' and laid out on pre-cut squares of butcher paper (cube steak paper).
The cut shown in the picture, however, based on it's marbling and connective tissue line, comes from the tail end of a top sirloin butt after the boneless sirloin steaks are cut off. The fat cap is removed and sliced into small steaks, then monikered as 'minute steaks', coming from the sirloin shell vs. the strip loin shell.
Those are pics of a sirloin butt, 1st is the face, the 2nd is the back end. You can see how it tapers down. When you're cutting it into sirloin steaks, you can only go about 2/3'ds through it until the size of the slices gets too small. So, what do you do with the tail end of it?
Here's your choices:
1) put it into grinds (burger - lose the most money)
2) cube steak or stew beef (higher retail than burger, more profit)
3) slice into thin 'minute steaks' at higher retail than cubes or stew (even more profit)
4) put in lunch box and take home (0% profit and you get fired! - I'm just kidding, but in most stores I worked in I would make it a point to go out of the store through a register and show the cashier my lunch pail that nothing was hidden! Eliminates any suspicions - you had to conduct yourself with a 'beyond reproach' attitude. Employee theft is 60%+ of all theft in a retail store.)
Hope this helps!