Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
> Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it.
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
If I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.
Starbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
I’m not GP but this hits for me so I’ll reply in good faith
I don’t actually care about the menu or sign. It’s a coffee drink and I’ve had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them. I know what I like and if it’s just stencil letters pinned on a cork board I don’t care. I just want to grab a coffee and go.
A shop with no pictures, just words? Sends a message that their coffee is probably good enough to speak for itself. Fine.
A shop with hand drawn lettering, ornate art? The coffee is probably made by people who care about their craft in some fashion. At least the person making my coffee probably enjoys their job a little. Fine.
Fully AI menu with gen Ai modeled drink pictures? The drink isn’t going to look like that. There is obviously no effort made here. They spent time to create a generic menu my kids could have put together. Worst of the lot, to be honest.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
This is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
My coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good.
They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Absolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus.
It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
Every single small coffee shop owner I know has employees. They work alongside them and do every job in the shop along with them. They operate in shifts, sometimes the owner is there for both open and close.
What does hiring a barista have to do with not making coffee yourself?
Gonna go with the "hilariously out of touch" comment. These places rarely print money to the point an owner can be an absentee manager type.
You're pretending not to comprehend the simple concept of a barista.
I can see you're not interested in a good faith conversation here. I'm not going to waste any more of my time. Feel free to keep on berating me if it makes you feel better.
The most fitting description of an owner of a small coffee shop is "barista". Most barista's I know also handle far more than just making coffee and serving customers. They do everything short of being personally financially responsible for the business itself.
It's quite clear that if anyone was operating in bad faith here, it's not the commenters challenging your position. Small business ownership is almost always simply a riskier version of having the job you're also hiring for with a very small chance of upside. Usually at lower pay.
In this particular case the owner was simply doing a task other barista's like herself were doing as part of the regular job of a barista.
> The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
This is the part I do not follow. Of course she is? What small coffee shop owner do you know does not personally make or serve the coffee on a regular basis? The only way not to take your original post in bad faith is to not understand your meaning.
