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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that Starbucks is the world's biggest unregulated bank, with their claws in the real estate industry. Who got that way by selling the experience of hanging out in a convenient coffee shop.

Their business has run into trouble a couple of times because MBA types in the company lost sight of this, then focused on trying to sell drinks efficiently. Thereby diluting the brand and business.

If you've got 22 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7YwFq8ZuM is a very informative walkthrough of the history and the business by the always funny youtuber, The Fat Electician. Highly recommended.

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IMO, they, like many other companies, were doomed by the constant chase for growth. Once they had a large share of "have a milk-coffee drink in a nice lounge" market, growth slowed. But having a large market share, good margins and growth that is the same as population/gdp (+/-) is just not acceptable.

So they try to find a way to get more growth, even if it changes and perhaps kills what the business was.

There's more to the story than that.

Around 2000 the founder stepped away, and MBAs brought in automated machines. They were more efficient and consistent at making the drinks than the baristas, and business tanked. The founder came back in 2008, got rid of the machines, and brought the baristas back. Business took off again.

It really is the experience that is being sold.

In the context of AI automation I keep coming back to "cute Starbucks barista" as the archetypal automation-proof job. Because the job isn't producing the beverage, but the little moment of human interaction. (Especially these days, when not much of it remains!)

Same goes with supermarket checkout. I noticed many people intentionally take the line where the human scans your stuff. They enjoy it!

Unfortunately many zoomers do not appear to have been informed of this fact, and will give you a worse experience, "humanity wise", than the self-check out machine!

When you treat your job as robotic, aside from making the experience worse for all involved, you are also competing with actual robots, i.e. competing on speed, price and consistency, which is not a great place for a human to be.

I'm assuming you're talking about those Clover machines. They were really, really good and well designed IIRC. Trying to automate the barista with them; well, that's where they messed up!

They also went from semi-auto espresso machines to full auto

Yeah, I guess if you can't grow revenue, the next best thing is to grow profit by cutting costs (or try both at the same time).

Honestly, their espresso has always been undrinkable, IMO

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