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:
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