i generally go to the store where the coffee tastes better
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.