{"id":4902,"date":"2017-08-09T03:17:26","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T03:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/?p=4902"},"modified":"2026-10-10T08:39:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T08:39:15","slug":"a-robot-barista-charged-me-for-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/technology\/a-robot-barista-charged-me-for-health-care\/","title":{"rendered":"A robot barista charged me for health care"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mrericsir\/36286608322\/in\/dateposted\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm5.staticflickr.com\/4435\/36286608322_d69debdbbf_z.jpg\" alt=\"Robot health insurance\"\/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Screenshot of the receipt<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Robots are handling food everywhere these days. Whether <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/local\/public-notice-beware-of-robots\/\">delivering falafel<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/local\/a-robot-served-ice-cream-at-bi-rite-creamery\/\">attempting to scoop ice cream,<\/a> there&#8217;s no escape from food robots in the Bay Area. All of which is fine with me: I, for one, welcome our new robot food service overlords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I&#8217;m not fine with, however, are spurious surcharges. So imagine my surprise when I paid a visit to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cafexapp.com\/\">Cafe X,<\/a> the robot coffee machine at the Metreon, and found a small surcharge on my bill for health care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While it&#8217;s not uncommon for San Francisco restaurants to add a surcharge for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Healthy_San_Francisco\">Healthy SF<\/a>, a local subsidized medical care program for those without health insurance, this is the first time a machine has charged me such a fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, I realize human employees maintain this robot. But if you think about it, Cafe X is nothing more than a fanciful vending machine. You put money in, make a selection, and a product comes out &#8212; that&#8217;s it. All vending machines require humans to restock it, clean it, etc. but when was the last time you went to buy a Coca-Cola from one only to find that your 99 cent beverage actually cost $1.10 because of a surcharge? Never, that&#8217;s when.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It also makes me wonder if the economics of this robot food service industry are really working out. The &#8220;robot&#8221; part of Cafe X is an off-the-shelf robot arm custom programmed to move cups around, the coffee beverages themselves are prepared by off-the-shelf automatic espresso machines. If Cafe X has to nickle and dime customers to the point where the prices are in line with Blue Bottle, why wouldn&#8217;t I go to Blue Bottle instead? It&#8217;s barely a block away, and to be honest their humans not only make better coffee, but they don&#8217;t charge an extra fee for health care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robots are handling food everywhere these days. Whether delivering falafel or attempting to scoop ice cream, there&#8217;s no escape from food robots in the Bay [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","slim_seo":{"title":"A robot barista charged me for health care - MrEricSir.com","description":"Robots are handling food everywhere these days. Whether delivering falafel or attempting to scoop ice cream, there's no escape from food robots in the Bay Area."},"autoblue_enabled":true,"autoblue_custom_message":"","autoblue_shares":[],"autoblue_post_url":"","autoblue_publish_document":false,"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":3,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":173,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[173,1290,75,650,1215,577,1099,23],"class_list":["post-4902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-cafe","tag-cafe-x","tag-coffee","tag-health","tag-healthysf","tag-metreon","tag-robots","tag-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4902"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11562,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions\/11562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}