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A comment on Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley. Parent comment

Re:Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of... by chiefofgxbxl on Wednesday September 13, 2017 @09:06PM (#15244181)
> 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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of... by setr on Wednesday September 13, 2017 @09:19PM (#15244257)
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
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Re:Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of... by kuschku on Thursday September 14, 2017 @04:10AM (#15245866)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of... by philh on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:18AM (#15246788)
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of... by kuschku on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:28AM (#15248342)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]