Robot coffee tastes great, but at what cost ? (about $5)

[steve2470]

https://www.wired.com/story/coffee-haus-robot-coffee/

Airports have robot coffee now.

But first, consider that moment—you’ve experienced this—where your multiply delayed flight finally lands, maybe at the airport you expected and maybe not. Then you realize, taxiing across the tarmac, that it is in fact the middle of the night. So picture the terminal, the one in which you are alone. The Hermès shop is not open. The massage place is kneadless. The food court is no longer in session. Should airports also be shopping malls? I don’t know. Right now this one, which usually is, isn’t.

Let’s say you’re at San Francisco International Airport, Terminal 3, across from the Yankee Pier fish place. There’s a signpost, up ahead. A glowing beacon in the night. Since early August, a touchscreen has offered lonely travelers a mug o’ mud—exuded by the sleek, cargo-container-sized structure looming next to it. This is a “Coffee Haus,” brown, horizontal window on one side, big touchscreen on the other, and in the middle, a white-framed presentation space. As the great architect and known caffeine abuser Le Corbusier would definitely have said, “a Coffee Haus is a machine for coffee.”

A hundred times an hour, it can make a coffee drink. Kevin Nater, CEO of Briggo, the company that builds Coffee Hauses (Häussen?), says a fully staffed Starbucks can only do one coffee drink a minute. Sixty an hour—and that’s with human people! All that stuff about “third places” and interpersonal interactions, the thing where hey, you wanna get a coffee, the Coffee Haus burns all that away.

[Major Nikon]

1. I think this is the trend that will replace many if not most coffee houses

Most of them are already at least partly automated. It won’t take that much to go all the way. Fast food will go that direction eventually also.

[Ptah]

2. I've seen those somewhere before!

[Kali]

3. !

[jberryhill]

4. Need the cups with the poker hands