[badgers]

> Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

We are already almost there. We have coffee vending machines. We have touch screen soda dispensers. Starbucks could wire in their mobile app to give customers a "redbox" coffee experience if they wanted to. I think it's part of their brand that a barista hand crafts your beverage rather than a machine do it, but who knows what their future direction will be.

[clubm8]

I think we won't see full automation, but a drastic reduction in the number of people required to run a store.

For example, I went into an American fast food restaurant in Amsterdam once. Orders were made on a touch screen, you get a number, then someone at the counter hands you your order.

They still have kitchen staff, but instead of having 5+ humans taking orders you have 5+ kiosks and one person calling numbers.

[mr_luc]

The state of the art for self-serve is low right now; it's like comparing a servant to a hand-cranked washing machine (current coffee vending machine experience). But if you compare to modern models that go quietly to work and have affordances like locking/unlocking on touch and projecting green or red dots on the floor to let you know if they're done washing, preferences will change.

Currently, companies that make people self-serve with touchscreens in restaurants or grocery stores are most commonly giving them a hostile (even hateful) user experience. But as voice UI starts to be more common, and you can marry visual and voice ...