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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 tha
by izzydata 18d ago
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.
- garyfirestorm 18d agoi generally go to the store where the coffee tastes better
- Freedom2 18d agoAgreed. That's actually what OP said as well.
- seattle_spring 18d agoUsing AI to make a sign is likely a pretty good indicator as to the effort the owner puts into other aspects of their business.
- orangedog 18d agoIt only signals to me that they have other priorities.
- Draiken 18d agoCorrect, but they own a coffee shop, they aren't building rockets. The menu is definitely a significant part of it. If they can barely do that, then I'm sure they're slacking off on more stuff too.
- JumpCrisscross 18d ago> The menu is definitely a significant part of it 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.
- asdff 18d agoYou think this is a signal of some great barista?
- mixedCase 18d agoStarbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation. The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
- YeGoblynQueenne 18d agoH... how do you know?
- bothers 18d ago[dead]
- jackb4040 18d agoAs a customer yes, I would have vastly higher confidence in the quality of a coffee shop with no pictures vs one that uses AI slop.
- mixedCase 18d agoWhy?
- mingus88 18d agoI’m not GP but this hits for me so I’ll reply in good faith 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.
- orangedog 18d agoIt was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
- ssl-3 18d agoJust printing this item was reported in the article as costing $150. How much might it cost to have someone local show up and produce a decent-looking chalkboard display?
- skupig 18d agoThis is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
- Draiken 18d agoHonestly, I'd rather have a word printed doc for the menu than this. It's not that difficult, doesn't require any skills and doesn't take any time. IDK, you own a business and do this sort of stuff and all sorts of red flags go off for me.
- quietsegfault 18d agoMy coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good. They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
- throw2836463 18d agoWhere do you draw the line? Is buying already roasted coffee beans a sign they are slacking off instead of roasting it themselves? What if they use a machine grinder instead of a hand grinder?
- seattle_spring 18d ago> It only signals to me that they have other priorities Yes, priorities other than their business.
- sega_sai 18d agoUnless they use the time they previously spent making a sign into making a better coffee.
- jrflowers 18d agoHow would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better 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?
- sippingabonedry 18d agoSpending the money you would have wasted on a flaky local artist to draw an overpriced disposable sandwich board on better coffee beans. 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.
- joquarky 18d agoThis is really repulsive. This kind of trolling makes me feel like donating to a local data center out of spite.
- fragmede 18d agoYes. It's a sign they spend a lot of effort making good coffee and don't have a lot of effort left over to work on a sign.
- krapp 18d agoThey own the business, they don't make the coffee, nor did they make the sign they had earlier.
- nrmitchi 18d ago> They own the business, they don't make the coffee You might not have spent a lot of time in the world of "small business", but this is hysterically out of touch.
- krapp 18d agoThe article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website. The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
- phil21 18d agoI don't follow. Even a little bit. 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.
- krapp 18d agoYou're pretending not to comprehend the simple concept of a barista. 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.
- marssaxman 18d agoSeems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
- thrance 18d ago> Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. 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.
- marssaxman 18d agoIf I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.
- quietsegfault 18d agoAbsolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus. It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
- siliconpotato 18d agoI wonder if they worry about the provenance of their meat. Might be delicious but you might be eating horse.
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- siliconpotato 18d agoNot if the slop marketing subsequently gives me indigestion
- ratelimitsteve 18d agothe only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- Legend2440 18d agoOh, please. You know what they're threatening: an internet mob. That's not just "talking".
- krapp 18d agoIt was literally just talking, though.
- brandon272 18d agoI think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
- jlarocco 18d agoOkay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO. If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
- fakedang 18d ago"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..." 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.
- jrflowers 18d agoNobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
- scotty79 18d agoThe role of the customer in the market is to choose the best quality for the lowest price. If you take anything else into consideration you are a bad customer that damages the market.
- izzydata 14d agoA coffee shop is more than just the coffee though. There are other considerations to be made such as location and the environment. I'm not sure you can really be a "bad customer". The customer wants whatever they want.