

Automation Comes To The Coffeehouse With Robotic Baristas - cpeterso
http://singularityhub.com/2012/05/09/automation-comes-to-the-coffeehouse-with-robotic-baristas/

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jes5199
The $4 price tag on Lattes mostly is there to pay for your interaction with a
human barista. Mechanizing coffee production misses the point - we _had_
automatic coffee before the Starbucks/Espresso thing happened, but people
prefer to pay more for the pseudo-social interaction.

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brianobush
my take is different, it isn't the social interaction, but the craft. I pay
for my drink to be made by a skilled hand (btw, I am not talking about
starbucks - but stumptown).

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jes5199
well, yes, Stumptown is quite good - but it's not what most people in the USA
get to drink.

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rwhitman
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat>

My dad (who is 81) used to tell me about an automat that existed in
Philadelphia when he was young called Horn & Hardart, in which was purely a
rack of vending machines where you got coffee, pastries, lunch etc. This was
in the 1950's. The business collapsed in the 60's.

A number of other attempts have been made over the years to bring back
automats, but none have been particularly popular in the US. From what I've
heard, in Asia they are thriving.

For whatever reason, apparently we Americans need humans to serve us hot
beverages.

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brc
I once visited a Japanese night club in Kyoto.

All the beer & other drinks (coke, water, etc) in the club was served by
vending machines around the edges of the club.

There was a bar but you only went there for cocktails or mixed drinks, and you
paid through the nose for the pleasure.

It's one of those things that, when you see it, you wonder 'why isn't it like
this everywhere?'.

The answer is probably something to do with responsible service of alcohol,
which for some reason isn't an issue in Japan (even though you see salarymen
passed out in gutters everywhere, I guess they don't tend to get into fights)

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toemetoch
There's actually an expo in Japan for Food Machinery and Technology:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSKMGurrPI>

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rubidium
Well I appreciate them having a market (at least at a university with on-the-
go students), automation backfired on Starbucks a few years back.

They ended up getting rid of many of their more automated machines because the
"theater" was lost [1].

[1] [http://coolmarketingstuff.com/where-starbucks-marketing-
went...](http://coolmarketingstuff.com/where-starbucks-marketing-went-wrong/)

~~~
femto
That might explain why they are using an unmodified coffee machine, with a
robot in front of it: it preserves the theatre.

From an efficiency viewpoint, it's got to be better to have a single machine
that just makes coffee, rather a machine to make coffee and a machine to drive
the coffee machine. I do think there is a market for Heath Robinson / Rube
Goldberg style vending machines that produce a product, but also produce a
show to go with it.

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moocow01
Robotic Barista == Big Coffee/Espresso Machine

In my opinion this is how coffee shops can collectively put themselves out of
business...

I have a coffee machine in my house and office. Its dirt cheap for me to make
good coffee but I still occasionally go to coffee shops for the atmosphere.

