> 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.

You think this is a signal of some great barista?

Starbucks 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.

H... how do you know?

As 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.

Why?

I’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.

It 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?

Just 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?

This 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.

Honestly, 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.

Where 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?

My 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.