So reading the news I saw this from Finance.yahoo.com,
Starbucks quietly retired its AI agent just months after deployment after it miscounted coffee shop inventories and slowed down baristas
I am going to give a “no shit” here. AI is problematic when the human element is involved. If there AI is also over the speaker the guy who orders 281.3 Waters is going to screw up the inventory because the AI has no idea that this person is screwing with it. A human would instantly respond.. Uhh no.
The coffee giant confirmed to Fortune it has made an operational decision to move to a single model of counting inventory following an announcement in September to deploy its automated counting tool.
This is the start of the beginning of the end of slap AI in a job and see if it works. The problem with AI is , it’s basically a sith , it only deals in absolutes, it can not tell when product is broken, stolen, or just removed.
The app, provided by NomadGo, took inventory of beverage components like milk and syrups in order to keep track of item shortages. In February, Reuters, which first reported the discontinuation of the tool this week, cited Starbucks sources who said the app often miscounted or mislabeled items, failing to identify the presence of bottles on shelves.
Again this is where sith mentality fails, if a person knows that a drink sucks with what starbucks tells them to use, one extra pump of a syrup is going to throw off the AI , unless you put sensors on every single thing in starbucks including the bathroom toilets it will not be able to know what stock is where. The human element knows what the stock is , they know how it is , but if somehow product is broken or Cups come in broken , the AI will count the stock and move on without taking note of the environment they are in.
“We test ideas in our coffeehouses, listen closely to partner feedback, and make changes to deliver a better, more consistent experience,” a spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. NomadGo didn’t immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
The factor that they did not reply to forturn for a comment is telling, the experiment did not only go bad, Guessing it got people fired for no reason, at least in my theory.
The app’s inaccuracies made employees’ workflow more challenging, he said. If the system counted too much of the product, it wouldn’t send enough of a product a store was running low on. If the system counted too little, it wouldn’t ship enough of a needed product.
This is the meat of the article. The AI could not account for the human element. It was built for streamlining profits without knowing what was going outside the inventory system. If there was a highschool game in the area The AIBucks could not figure out why stock flew out the window, and try to order the next days stuff at the bare minimum for profit margins. Like if they had 100 customers in one day the system would likely order 105 products not taking in that there was an event in the community the next day. human intuition is needed here, if one of the workers goes hey there is a huge gathering tomorrow they would stock extra for the next day , if left over stock less for the third day .
Former CEO Laxman Narasimhan said in early 2024 customers were abandoning mobile orders because of long wait times and product availability.
Starbucks misses this point so bad. Even today the 10 minute wait for a fucking coffee is insane. You have 5 people working and 10 people in the store and it takes 20 minutes for 5 people in line because the CEO believes that starbucks is an experience. No , if starbucks wants an experience . Follow hershey, open a theme park in Penn. But the 9$ coffee thinking people want an experience is missing the point. You will get influencers doing this, but the guy who just wants a coffee waiting 10 minutes on a 15 minute break will leave and go to dunkin donuts and have a coffee in 2 minutes.
So far, Starbuck’s turnaround strategy, which also includes adding cozier seating and paring back menu items, appears to be working. Last month, the company reported a 7.1% increase in quarterly comparable U.S. sales last quarter
This 7.1% is temporary, in all likelihood this is churn coming back due to AI enshitification. And I do agree. starbucks seating reminds me of the seats outside of the principals office when I went to school. Give or take I’d rather have my coffee from my coffee pot and occasionally from dunkin. I don’t need a song and dance for my coffee, I just want my coffee in a timely matter and leave as fast as I can.
So I was at the market, and I went to get some Propel packets. I noticed that the box has changed and that struck me as odd, and I looked at the packaging. They decided to shrink the package and make the product less useful.
The left package is the new package. The right is the package the old. Here’s the thing they are priced more expensive for less product.
oldnew
They jacked the price and made less product. they made it look like you were getting more in the individual packet by making them larger. But if you look at what they did they removed stabilizers so the shelf life is less . By Reducing it to 8 packets you lose 20% of the Product.
So thank you Gatorade for making me give you some haterade and making your product more shitty. Hype up on Vit b and enshitify the rest.
I was looking at videos today and I realize that we(the US) have so badly bifurcated our culture. We are all angry, We all want to yell fuck off to each other. It takes so much energy to be constantly angry. We need to fucking stop already. Work through our differences, This is not a red vs blue thing, Its humanity and we as a culture can not survive if we keep this.
The news tells us to be angry, social media tells us to be outraged, but, its is missing one thing… How to fix it! Realistically watching the news you do not see any caring articles anymore. Social media is brainrot to blind us from the real issues.
Look at this . its 11 months ago! everyone getting together and dropping their differences in a flash mob forgetting for one moment in time to join in and be “one” rather than trying to judge a person of why to hate them.
This alone should tell you as a culture we have become so divided that we forget compassion, we forget empathy and try to divide each other for no reason what so ever other than spread hate.
The psychological stress today in the US is so high we are stuck to our screens going what next, another group waits to find out what to hate next. This is not a red vs blue issue, this not Female vs male vs trans issue, this is a human issue. When we are told to hate trans, The next excerpts an entire portion of people born out of the norms of gender. Look up XXY, XYY, XXX, and XO chromosomes, The thing is there are more of those people who do not fall into the binary gender than Trans folks themselves.
We need to get back to the point of basic human appreciation. Honestly, these folks who are thrown into the system without a choice and have an angry mob ruining every aspect of their lives and they did not make a choice to do anything. They are thrown to the wolves and more over it should not happen.
To come away from our ideological differences and work towards the human condition. If you want to dress and drag and do the hula , that’s up to you. In 1994 no one batted an eye over one line in the Lion King, Now there is a profound moral crisis that can be solved in one word.. “hi” rather than judge someone before you even talk to them. If someone falls pick them up, you cant just leave someone falling than record them for a tiktok video because you think its funny. If they laugh while you recorded that, give them a hand and ask if you can use it , in that one moment you created a connection if they say no then delete it while showing them. You have created a profound moment of human connection.
We as the citizens offload cognitivally offload our empathy to the news and parse it to the daily norm and break our connection to humanity. The flash mobs in paris should be a lesson to the human condition. For one moment in the lives of someone in paris stops and sees this happen, they forget for one moment all of their anger and join in for a singular profound moment of togetherness. We have handed over our critical thinking and emotional intelligence to corporate news anchors and tech algorithms, and we are paying for it with our sanity. This needs to stop and we should take care of our emotional ecosystems, Saying good morning to your neighbor might change their day , there needs to be change. Emotion sociological change.
We’re standing at the edge of absolute cultural exhaustion, We need to have grace and compassion even to the ones you disagree with.. In the end we are all human and we have a machine telling us what to hate.
But in the end. If you see a person who is having a bad day , ask are you ok, they might be weirded out but its a single moment of connection that we all need. we need to stop treating people like props for a TikTok video, you step in to manually pull up someone who takes a fall, a loss or profound injury Physical or mental , and you ask a person having a rough day if they’re doing alright. That changes the whole trajectory of the universe for you and that person. so like Nike, Just do it!
There have been so many articles today with coffee in mind. One was the Price of coffee is down. Jim Roemer a Meteorologist Is asking if coffee prices have bottomed
Have the Fundamentals Affecting Coffee Prices Bottomed for Now.
However, Brooke DiPalma Senior Reporter asks another question and it leaves the reader confused if you commonly look at news for coffee.
Coffee prices keep rising, and chains like Dutch Bros are swallowing most of the costs
Right now if you look at the spot commodity price there is a seperate story here. Jim Roemer, Likely sees that crops last year were affected by multiple things at once. Tariffs, Crop Failures , Weather issues. Jim is likely a better man to see this because his titles are vast. He Pluralist that can read both sides of the story. If you line up his skills Meteorologist, Commodity Trading Advisor, Principal, Best Weather Inc. & Climate Predict – Publisher, Weather Wealth Newsletter and Climatelligence. If he starts talking about markets I am likely to listen.
Now the fast food coffee prices are skyrocketed, Starbuck stopped selling coffee and is doing the $9 coffee “Experience” , the Coffee sellers of the drink are testing the markets of seeing how far they can press the price of the cup of coffee to the person. Its bullshit, I don’t want an experience, I want a coffee that’s it . No experience.
But these companies want a SAAS(shit as a service) , they want you to come in and “experience” a coffee rather than drink a coffee. Honestly, they are protecting their profits because prices have gone down, When the tariffs hit they burst priced the coffee and claimed tariffs, if anyone has done their homework tariffs are not an issue at this point. The coffee crops at this moment are 100% better than last years.
The thing is prices spike and than they feather fall downwards where the corp earns huge profits to the unknowing. The thing is … If even 5% of people even followed the commodity markets and mass messaged Starbucks and said “Hey . why are you charging so much for a coffee when the markets have gone down 25%” it would have CEOS and boards cringing in their seats on social media.
To which end even the home coffee has come up in price but not nearly as bad as the “cup”.. at $18 dollars a container its gross, The prices have stayed up since the tariffs hit and has not gone down by much more than a few cents. It’s all bullshit and another SAAS to force the consumer base to follow and eat the prices. I do understand the swing in contract prices and often they are delayed but, even this far along the prices should have dropped. I am not going to drop 10$ for 2 coffees when I can just brew a whole pot at home.
National Gas Tax suspension to fuck you over later, they are looking to suspend the tax.The current tas is at 18.4 cents a gallon. Notice the wording suspend. Not stop, likely they are going to not collect it and than raise it to 36.8 cents to make it back . Basically they are just giving you a defered loan.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing suspending the federal gas tax amid soaring prices at the pump caused by the war with Iran. The gas tax is currently 18 cents per gallon, and gas prices in the U.S. are about $4.50 per gallon on average. Voters are souring on Trump’s economy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, and high gas prices are only adding to consumer discontent.
This is a deferment of 112.4 million a day!
Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday that he would “reduce” the tax, shortly after saying in an interview with CBS News that he wants to pause the tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said in the CBS interview. “Yup, we’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in.”
Sure, the Administration will defer it till the next election and blame the democrats when a billion dollar bill is due back at the pump. People have no idea how much this would affect the national infrastructure system, all of the bridges, other things that would fall into disrepair due to federal funding being frozen due to this.
Trump cannot declare a gas tax holiday alone, since Congress has sole authority over taxation. But several Republican lawmakers on Monday floated suspending the gas tax, which clocks in at 18.4 cents per gallon, the same amount it’s been since 1993.
This is unlikely to pass, but this gas lay-away plan will hit the pumps when you least expect it.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Monday said he would immediately introduce a bill to suspend the federal gas tax in a post to X. And Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said she would be “introducing a bill in the House to suspend the federal gas tax in light of Trump’s recent remarks.” “American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief, this is Gas HELOC plan. It will come back with interest later, because the 112.4M a day gains no interest, It is just a payment plan that is put back on the national debt. The other thing is if you look at the highway Adminstration, the infrastructure money will run out just before the election and who over gets the handoff on “The roads are falling apart” will be the media screaming for months.
Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla “American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief. its like a fart with the gas prices.. By holding the fart you save current environment because it seems not to stink, but it when comes to release and if you try to force it (collect the federal gas tax deferment) it gonna stink like when you are sick and can’t hold it anymore, and you try to let a little out and you shit yourself..
Gas prices in the U.S. currently sit at about $4.52 per gallon, according to AAA’s national average, approaching the highest recorded average price of $5.02 in June 2022. Slashing the federal gas tax would bring that down to roughly $4.34 per gallon.
This is just is a credit card at the pump, you save 18 cents at the pump and by the time the next time it comes to collect the taxes you’ll have to pay 36 cents because of interest.
In the end with a 14 gallon tank you save $2.58 and you can maybe afford cheap gas station coffee, that you have to pay back later. It’s a sham if they defer costs.
While the bill has not been filed yet. this is my thought on a gas tax moratorium to delay or defer gas taxes, in the end it will effect more than saving on your gas.
Attributions from:
CNBC: Trump, congressional Republicans float suspending federal gas tax amid Iran war
Is $9 for a Starbucks coffee a “premium experience?” The company’s CEO has defended it as such
$9 coffee?! NINE FUCKING DOLLAR COFFEE?! Moreover the Premium Experience? I want a coffee not a fucking show. I walk in to dunkin donuts and I walk out with a coffee in less than 3 to 5 minutes. Starbucks, You walk in to music that is almost too loud, 12 influencers mobbing the cake pops, A line 10 deep, 6 people waiting for a coffee, A dog and Usually a layout that makes you wonder who got drunk with the floor plans.
He explained that Starbucks is doing “really well” with Gen-Z and millennial consumers, and that the K-shaped economy — which refers to the growing disparity between high-income and low-income Americans — is not impacting Starbucks’ business, where the “average spend” is just under $10.
My guy I want my coffee flavored coffee, in a cup , not be given a sonnet , a poem or any other shit. The fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol thinks getting a coffee is an experience. Starbucks trying to sell coffee as an admission fee is the same shit as software as a service. if a person drinks 1 coffee a day from starbucks 5 days a week. You are spending more than 2,349 dollars in a year.. for the same amount you can buy a BLACK&DECKER CAFÉCRAFT 12-Cup Coffee Maker for 30$ and 178 Cans of Maxwell House Smooth Bold Dark Roast Ground Coffee, 26.7 oz Canister for 13$ a Can.. 601 pots of a coffee if my math is right. Meaning A pot of coffee every day of the week and leaving enough room for Almost 2 pots every 3rd day.
The thing is , Brian Niccol Is not throwing this out for the Adults, he is throwing it out there for the “Influencers” and “Starbucks kids” He knows they will make a run on this because its a “premium coffee experience” because once the blind huddled masses hear about an EXPERIENCE.. they will run for it like the glass bear mugs that nearly get people killed at christmas.
“And then in other cases, people believe, ‘Well, this is a really affordable premium experience,’ because they’re saying like, ‘Well, it’s less than $10 and I get a really premium experience,’” he continued.
You want a premium experience? Stop drinking starbucks coffee for 24 days and Buy Dunkin instead, than with the leftover pay up front for 1 year of netflix up front. This is targeted at tiktok viral trends and sephora kids.
Niccol was named CEO of Starbucks in September 2024 and has since focused on improving the customer experience, including by installing better seating and creating a smoother pick-up process, according to The WSJ.
They forgot literally the stealing kids money for Niccol, The man should be renamed to Niccoltine, he just wants trend addicts to flood his store.
As for me, I’ll be having my own premium experience making my own coffee and using my own flavorings for 1/10th the price of the starbucks “Experience”.
Today will be interesting, we will learn how much large corps are going to play the shell game with earnings.
Amazon (AMZN) will report its first quarter earnings alongside rivals Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) on Wednesday, with investors looking for more signs that the company’s massive artificial intelligence spending is paying off.
My personal feeling.. No. However this does not stop them from playing the shell game of hiding costs and contracts that have not been put to action yet. These companies account for 650 billion of cape ex spending.
The problem here is the market is betting the farm on a large loss leader. Big Tech knows this and they are trying to engineer there way through this problem by throwing more money and more power at it . AI as it stands right now is about as efficient as a 16 cylinder engine with only one sparkplug working. The problem is with AI being a subsidized land grab at the moment the scale is not fit for its current market. With A Slop being the top thing with AI right now and your average query to AI wasting enough power to light a lightbulb for months. In part why the Sam Altmans and the Bill Gates of the world looking for nuclear power plants to offset these cost to the of thousands of GWh of power.
Right now with power costs soaring, the cost per query is not sustainable, When your average British person can warm there tea 50 times over for a slop query. The problem here is the rate of return on LLM’s is degrading, as LLM’s are looking for more training data they are getting flooded with the very slop they are creating, The people now jailbreaking and hijacking AI’s to act like spongebob squarepants the sexy pirate is filling AI’s systems with irrelevant data to the point its becoming its own fever dream. So the 650B investment is poisoning the future well of returns.
For the quarter, Amazon is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.62 on revenue of $177.2 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus estimates. The company saw earnings per share of $1.59 and revenue of $155.6 billion in Q1 last year.
Sure a revenue of 177.2 billion. but they are spending like they have a blank check. Eventually when that check clears will Amazon have enough in the bank to cover the check. When Returns on AI is only 15b the rate of return is much slower than the spending. They are building out now and hoping that the machine will have a return later or get bailed out in the end. We’ve heard this all before “too big to fail”. To any person that knows what that line means they just clenched their anus.
But in the end these calls will be interesting, If the earnings call shows a positive it shows that these companies are playing the shell game. Amazon is only getting 15b return per quarterly run shows that the math is flawed. To get that expensive back that will take 3.33 years, if Amazon stops investing today.
And the final flaw is , What if some other game changer comes out of a garage that has a home grown AI out of there garage that makes all these data centers look like nothing more than space heaters for towns. Deepseek has constantly outdone large llms for less than 5% of the money and that’s a secret that the hyperscalers hope you don’t see.
Post mortem: It would appear that all of the companies are posting strong numbers. How long this will last is the greatest question. Further is the biggest question. Metas numbers was the 8k layoff and 6k closed positions a part of there jump?
Every company beat there expectations, what does that mean to the little guy. Absolutely nothing. no lowered prices, it just means some CEO was able to light there cigar with a 100$ bill today.
In order to show some sort of profit, meta is firing 10000 people and closing 6000 open positions, This is biting off your arm to save your foot.
Meta said on Thursday it plans to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, the latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled in part by artificial intelligence.
The company is also closing around 6,000 open roles, Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in a memo published by Bloomberg that Meta confirmed to CNN.
This is insane. They are firing workers to replace with AI , the problem is AI can’t walk, it can’t improvise its position, and lastly without AI the only innovation they get is AI hallucination.
The company has also been splurging on talent for its superintelligence lab and has acquired buzzy AI startups like Moltbook and Manus as part of its ongoing efforts to compete with OpenAI and others.
The problem here is that in the past Meta had people working on all sorts of things. now they are doing a ground level overfocus and are putting all of the eggs into one basket and I feel like the payoff is not going to be what meta wants. Give or take companies are all jockeying for position to hit the innovation jackpot on AI. the problem is most of the companies that are playing the CAPEex game is doing it by scaling and not code.
Amazon said in January it would lay off 16,000 workers, its second large-scale layoffs in three months, emphasizing the need for efficiency. fintech firm Block’s announcement in February that it would lay off 40% of its workforce, more than 4,000 people, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the start of this year that the company, which has invested heavily in AI, could see workforce changes because of the technology. On Meta’s January earnings call, he called 2026 “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.”
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Here’s my counter-point to this, You fired 16000 positions, if this person is supposedly replacing that many workers, what happens when your Very Talented Person gets sick? Or, a power outage? Or, LLM data loss. Now if your Very Talented Person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to … 1 , Whereas before one person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to 13999. And lets just say for instance the person that would of replaced your Very Talented Person makes an innovation that improves working by triple, you end up having your Replacement guys efficiency 13999 to 41,997.
Like many big tech companies, Meta eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in 2022 and 2023, reductions that were largely attributed to right-sizing after Covid-era spikes in usage and hiring. Last year, the company said it would cut about 5% of what it called its “lowest performers,” although it planned to backfill many of those roles.
This is not right-sizing, this is full on cannibalization, Everyone is jumping for the AI goldrush while some chinese man in his garage is laughing at the Cape-ex and deepseeking the best coffee ideas.
In a blog post, Microsoft says Defender is enough for most Windows 11 users. No extra antivirus needed if you keep defaults enabled and update regularly.
Microsoft might be right, but instead they are so wrong here, The average computer problem exist between the computer and the chair. Even the most security minded individual can find themselves trapped in a moment where they have to wipe their entire PC out due to one misclick .
Give or take even if you have a secure version of windows they are assuming you never install 3rd party software, Never update your drivers and never have the computer on the internet with the computer locked in a scif. Otherwise, the second you are on the internet, Microsoft is leaking a shit ton of telemetry on your computer to the world.
if you never take a risk ever with the computer, You should be “fine” however you go to site to download common safe software and you get to play roulette, four different download buttons two chain off to different sites and one gives you the computer STD.
From the second you enter in your information for your windows 11 , Windows(microsoft) is already messing around in your cupboards taking inventory so if you have a stash of photos of your family Microsoft has already taken that and moved it to onedrive without asking much… well they did but they did a batch accept on all microsoft logins and by the time you violated some privacy policy or moved a picture of someone who did not want to be on the net it is already there with a shared use from microsoft. Given the fact that MS leaks this much out of the box anyone trying to hide from domestic abusers or worse there is a major chance to leak and leave yourself out in the open.
The other thing is , if there is a 0-day exploit on a wednesday, You have to wait till next tuesday until MS patches windows defender to update the definitions. With mainstream AV programs , it could be as little as hours until the AV updates to stop the 0-day.
Also bad websites are telling people to put commands in the “search” which in reality just fucks you over by installing spyware where you might just kiss your bank account goodbye. NEVER run anything a website asks you to do in a search bar.
But to make Microsoft’s Assertion accurate. You turn on the PC , Never Log it in. Air gap the updates to it . Never connect it to the internet. destroy bluetooth and Wifi Cards. Otherwise the second that PC thinks its on a network it shouting into the ether on IM HEEEEEEEEEEEERE.
Not to mention, Microsoft undoes any safety margins you have created every time it updates. Deleting onedrive from the system is like trying to get rid of lice with butter, it just doesn’t work. It switches you back to Edge and tries to import anything from other browsers back to edge. Microsofts security is part of the whole, if you must run it , Get Malwarebytes , on a secondary level do not be afraid to run another anti-virus to be double sure. if your PC is acting strange, don’t just assume that everything is ok. Google occasionally fails at spot checking their own sponsored links. That vector can lead to the fastest accidental system infection.
The worst part of the whole thing is Microsoft claims to have made everything easier, it has made it where as long as you invite the vampire in by either command line or installed software or even microsoft themselves they are free to do what they want and microsoft defender won’t look up from looking at the magazine it’s looking at.
A single misclicked installed chrome or edge extension can lift your entire saved password folder without even as much as a thank you.
In the end Microsoft is saying you can have the safest PC in the world, Just don’t use it, move it to an island without internet nor power and your fine.
This here is a tracked price of an SSD from amazon that clearly shows how much AI is driving the price up for every human in existence. to replace the SSD in a cheap computer now costs more than the cheap laptop or computer you bought in 2024. It eradicates any advantages in buying consoles and more.
