Saw a 'fully automated' coffee shop in Seattle and it made me question the whole trend

The place had no staff, just machines and a QR code to order. It felt efficient but also completely dead, like a vending machine with chairs. Has anyone actually built a good team culture in a business that runs on this model?

3 comments

3 Comments

henrygrant1mo ago

That "dead" feeling you got is just the shock of the new. Maybe a team culture looks totally different when you're not all in the same room. @leoshah's friend might have had remote techs quit, but that sounds like a management problem, not a tech problem. You could build a really tight, focused team of engineers who are proud of keeping a perfect system running. Their culture would be about solving problems and uptime, not coffee breaks together. Isn't the goal of any business to serve the customer well, whether a person or a machine does the handing over?

leoshah1mo ago

Remember my buddy who ran that automated car wash. He tried to build a team spirit with the remote techs, but they all quit. Said it felt like fixing robots for a ghost.

bettyk5324d ago

But what if the ghost is the problem? A team needs a shared purpose, not just a list of tasks. Those techs didn't quit because the work was hard, they quit because they felt no human connection to the place they were keeping alive. You can't build spirit around a machine if the people feel like just another part of it.