I understand detailed feedback on huge multi-million dollar industrial machines where proactive maintenance based upon massive ML datapoints can save unexpected downtimes with millions in damage, but on coffee machines?!
And so, people want replicable coffee drinks. And coffee can be a fickle beast to brew. Given that, unlike McDonald's which can freeze and ship, you must go from bean to drink on premise in a matter of minutes, I could see a focus on trying to ferret out a way to make that expensive cup taste the same from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
There's a 2013 article on why 30% of Michelin-star restaurants went with Nespresso, which seems to have consistency down: https://www.grubstreet.com/2013/03/nespresso-sold-at-micheli...
It is a bit more startling in the United States because it is such a large country. Imagine crossing a reasonable fraction of the globe and the food is still the same! The comfort of the familiar is an incredibly strong lure and I believe it happens in ways that are so broad we can hardly see we are within them, like a bug on the surface of a tidal wave. Food and drink homogeneity is only one of the ways, but is likely one of the more primal. People of a certain age, when given Kosher-for-Passover Coke (still made with sugar) are delighted by the return to what they grew up with.
In any case, Starbucks wants a customer who, perhaps having had their fill of experimental recipes and lunches at new places, can reach for a stimulus just like they had before. It might mean a lot in an airport terminal after nights on a mattress you've never slept on before.
I remember visiting NY and being fascinated by many of the options I've never seen in other countries.
(2) Starbucks business depends on having those measurements for quality control
(3) Starbucks gets lots of vendor deals from partner companies because they are a well know brand and having them on board helps land more deals
(4) Hacker using the machines might be able to sabotage the stories; food poisoning, fires, etc
(5) The smarter the tech in store — less training required per employee on site.
(6) Starbucks has other plans for it, such as enabling customers to use their network for IoT devices
(6) etc.
We know that the larger the attack surface the more likely is to get hacked so if Starbucks really cares about everything you said (i.e food safety issues) it should hire more people and less machines.
Starbucks is a massive chain people expect the same thing at any Starbucks they go to. People are very inconsistent, if the coffee tasted different at every Starbucks they would not be as large as they are.
While I understand the urge want to humanize the process, give people jobs, this is not the way to do it.
Future of human employees inside of Starbucks is clearly focused on what the baristas do best as humans, being friendly person that’s humanize the experience of getting coffee.
As for including humans in food safety procedures, what exactly are you referring too? Inserting 30-60 IoT continuous environmental and systems monitoring sensors into a store clearing makes more sense that paying a human to be in the store 24/7 and writing it down on paper. If I am recalling correctly, Starbucks has already saved millions by not letting the on site employees control the HVAC systems.
It would be weird if Starbucks wasn’t investing in their coffee machines. Make me wonder what they were spending their money on.