Chatbots telling us what we want. Robots making our coffee. Baristas reduced to smiling servers. If Starbucks and other brands get their way, this is the future: a frictionless, interactionless, lifeless coffee experience.
The internet is full of warnings about the dangers lurking within coffee, whether it’s mould, mycotoxins, or other contaminants. The truth, however, is far more prosaic.
Chatbots telling us what we want. Robots making our coffee. Baristas reduced to smiling servers. If Starbucks and other brands get their way, this is the future: a frictionless, interactionless, lifeless coffee experience.
When Starbucks announced the launch of its ChatGPT partnership recently, the company was keen to highlight how personal and creative the integration would be.
“Over the past year, one thing has become clear: customers aren’t always starting with a menu”, Paul Riedel, the company’s senior vice president of digital and loyalty wrote in a blog post on April 15. “They’re starting with a feeling”.
Using the Starbucks app embedded within OpenAI’s generative chatbot, customers can “find a Starbucks drink based on their mood or vibe of the day”, Riedel wrote. “We want to meet customers right in that moment of inspiration and make it easier than ever to find a drink that fits”.
It’s fair to say that the response has been… ambivalent at best. Reviewers noted difficulties using the app—David Pierce in The Verge called the experience “a complete mess”—or found the whole thing rather pointless. This response was echoed by social media users: one Redditor wrote “its so awful i might actually have to stop going to starbucks bc of this”.
I have written before about the coffee industry’s embrace of generative AI. And I am, on a personal level, against its use. With the Starbucks story, the question I keep coming back to—and it is not a particularly groundbreaking or unique insight—is simply: why? What is the point of this? Starbucks says that the integration is “grounded in human connection”, but it feels designed specifically to let customers avoid human interaction as much as possible.
I would speculate that virtually everyone who enters a coffee shop has an idea of what they want to drink. If they don't, there are menus. Of course, occasionally you might want something different, to try a new drink or change things up. In those situations, the barista is right there.
Encouraging customers to interact with a chatbot instead feels both unnecessary and increasingly dystopian.
For paid subscribers: A fascinating academic paper delves into the ways Korean Buddhists, after centuries of drinking tea, have started to embrace coffee.
For paid subscribers: One of Howard Schultz’ final acts as Starbucks CEO was inflicting upon us a line of olive oil-infused coffee drinks. He was so confident the Oleato would change the world. It didn’t.
For paid subscribers: The coffee industry is embracing automation, and consumers increasingly demand convenience and speed. Me? I’m happy to wait for my coffee to be made by a human.
Even Starbucks and Peet’s stores have regulars who are sad when they close.
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