[Houshalter]

Yeah this isn't terribly exciting. People have been demoing self driving tractors and farm machinery for decades. Ford had one in the 1950s. Most of the hard work like actually picking the crop has already been solved, and making the tractor self driving just saves a few hours of work at most.

What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive. An automated greenhouse would be enormous news.

Whats also cool is stuff like this (https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...) which eliminates the need for pesticides.

[bamboozled]

That's the reason they are still so expensive.

My observations have been that vegetables are so inexpensive they're often thrown away?

Obviously these cheap crops are often grown in a monetarily cheap but environmentally destructive way but I've no idea where you're seeing these expensive vegetables for sale?

[Houshalter]

I meant expensive in a relative sense. A pound of corn is a few cents, a pound of vegetables is a few dollars (it's far worse when you compare price per calorie.) Maybe expensive is the wrong word to use, but the economic impact of automating this would be quite enormous. And I have seen people complain that eating healthier is more expensive.

[chiefofgxbxl]

> What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive.

Same deal with coffee beans, which contributes to their higher price. The coffee beans do not ripen at the same time, so they must be hand-picked so the worker can identify which ones are ready. Lots of manual labor.

And with coffee being so widely consumed, savings here would easily be felt by a lot of people, although I doubt Starbucks would like it...

[setr]

Why would starbucks be against lowered supply prices? Either the whole market drops in price and starbucks keeps the same profit margin but lowers actual price, or starbucks just sells the same price but now with higher margins than before

[kuschku]

Because Starbucks has found a carefully balanced point between being affordable enough that it has mainstream appeal, and expensive enough that it seems premium.

Any change, absolute or relative, would reduce their margin.

[philh]

Do you claim that the current price of coffee beans is the price that happens to maximise Starbucks' profits? (This seems implausible to me, unless Starbucks has fairly strong control over the price of coffee beans.)

Or is your claim more narrow than that?

[kuschku]

My claim is that the current price of coffee beans happens by coincidence to be close to the optimum for Starbucks’ profits, and any major change would be a disadvantage.