Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.
If they can barely do that, then I'm sure they're slacking off on more stuff too.
The overlap in skills between photographing your product and being a great barrista aren't obviously overlapping.
The takeaway seems to be to remove images from the menu.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
I don’t actually care about the menu or sign. It’s a coffee drink and I’ve had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them. I know what I like and if it’s just stencil letters pinned on a cork board I don’t care. I just want to grab a coffee and go.
A shop with no pictures, just words? Sends a message that their coffee is probably good enough to speak for itself. Fine.
A shop with hand drawn lettering, ornate art? The coffee is probably made by people who care about their craft in some fashion. At least the person making my coffee probably enjoys their job a little. Fine.
Fully AI menu with gen Ai modeled drink pictures? The drink isn’t going to look like that. There is obviously no effort made here. They spent time to create a generic menu my kids could have put together. Worst of the lot, to be honest.
How much might it cost to have someone local show up and produce a decent-looking chalkboard display?
IDK, you own a business and do this sort of stuff and all sorts of red flags go off for me.
They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
What if they use a machine grinder instead of a hand grinder?
Yes, priorities other than their business.
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
The entitlement is off the charts. The more I read this insanity, the more I hope she printed it at Walmart with a discount coupon.
You might not have spent a lot of time in the world of "small business", but this is hysterically out of touch.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
Every single small coffee shop owner I know has employees. They work alongside them and do every job in the shop along with them. They operate in shifts, sometimes the owner is there for both open and close.
What does hiring a barista have to do with not making coffee yourself?
Gonna go with the "hilariously out of touch" comment. These places rarely print money to the point an owner can be an absentee manager type.
I can see you're not interested in a good faith conversation here. I'm not going to waste any more of my time. Feel free to keep on berating me if it makes you feel better.
It's quite clear that if anyone was operating in bad faith here, it's not the commenters challenging your position. Small business ownership is almost always simply a riskier version of having the job you're also hiring for with a very small chance of upside. Usually at lower pay.
In this particular case the owner was simply doing a task other barista's like herself were doing as part of the regular job of a barista.
> The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
This is the part I do not follow. Of course she is? What small coffee shop owner do you know does not personally make or serve the coffee on a regular basis? The only way not to take your original post in bad faith is to not understand your meaning.
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
If you take anything else into consideration you are a bad customer that damages the market.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
If it were me, I would have called their bluff and ignored them.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
> If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
No, if you have to make several indirect causal leaps, to get from "shop owner uses ChatGPT instead of MS Word to generate a menu" to "somewhere a graphic designer loses their employment" it is not legitimate. And if that is how you interpret the world, virtually any harmful or even violent action can be rationalized in the name of stopping some probabilistic harm.
Sticking with your cow's milk analogy, serving the wrong milk to the wrong customer with a dairy allergy can cause immediate harm to their health. Generating an AI menu cannot be reasonably interpreted as causing direct harm to anyone.
> If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
I completely agree. But making a personal choice to not visit a business and undertaking a coordinated effort to organize a boycott against a business is in a different category altogether.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
People are vocal about what they feel passionate about, and a world where they weren't or couldn't sounds hellish to me. How would society ever progress? We'd still have "whites only" restaurants in that world.
Not saying that justifies all anger targeted at business owners, but a blanket "criticism bad" stance is a bit silly. You have to make an actual argument as to why you think the anti-AI crowd is misguided in this case.