Yes, I would like a coffee robot

Briggo is a company that has made a coffee robot, which vends coffee to customers in lieu of a barista.  It is perfect for someone looking to grab a coffee and go – no hassle, just stop at the Briggo robot, pick up your cup of coffee, and move on with your day.   Personally, I think this would be fantastic if it became widespread – I would love to be able to press a button and get myself an iced coffee with half and half in the morning, without having to worry whether the barista heard my order correctly, or if they will give me caffeinated coffee when I asked for decaf (that has happened to me before unfortunately).  However, some think that automating the coffee shop would make the customer experience worse – by removing human interaction, customers who got their order wrong would have no way to explain what happen and get another cup of coffee, for instance.  Another issue is that coffee shops are inherently a social place – would replacing people with machines change that experience?

            This has been a debate that has been going on for a long time – what happens when you replace jobs that were previously done by people with machines?  A long time ago, machines replaced many jobs in factories, but they never replaced people completely – plenty of people work in factories today alongside machines, doing things that machines cannot.  Similarly, I believe that a coffee robot like this would not completely replace baristas.  It would be there to serve the majority of customers, but there would need to be a human barista on the side to make coffee by hand if the machine malfunctioned, or if customers had a special order that the machine could not process for some reason.  If the coffee robot turned out to be more efficient than baristas in terms of speed of producing coffee, this would seem to be the ideal coffee shop – a few machines making coffee for most people, with a barista or two on the side handling special cases.

            As mentioned in the article I linked above, the food-service industry is considered to be an industry where jobs cannot be outsourced, which is why it is so interesting that this is the domain of the coffee robot.  Personally, I think that if this could be done for coffee, then eventually we could have automated machines for fast-food as well.  Cooking a burger at a fast-food restaurant is a rote task that seems perfect for automation, and I suspect the only reason that it has not been done yet is that the cost of making a machine to do it would be too great.  There are many benefits of automation – if I can simply press buttons to tell the machine what toppings I want on my burger, then I do not have to worry about the employee at the drive-thru misunderstanding me and giving me onions when I never asked for any, something that happens quite often in food service.  The downside of not having a person is that if the machine breaks or malfunctions, the customer experience diminishes greatly.  So it seems that we must find a balance between having fast service as well as getting decent customer service.

            The most interesting part about this robot is how it is replacing a job that is, in general, a social one – the coffee shop is a social place, and baristas often make small talk with customers and perhaps brighten their day.  Any time the customer needs a recommendation about coffee or has a problem with their beverage, the barista is there to help.  We know from calling any customer service department of a large company that talking to a robot and trying to have a human interaction is extremely frustrating, and it seems that there is only more of that to come in the future.  However, if we can have at least one human employee in our coffee shops to look over things, we should have a better experience after all.

Sources:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/briggo_coffee_robot_should_starbucks_replace_baristas_with_machines.html