Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
[SNIP]
Plus, blowing $50k on a coffee shop, including $12k on an espresso machine? What's up with that?
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I don't know about the $$ for the coffee shop, but I may be able to spread some light on the $12K for an espresso machine.
We went through the process of buying an espresso machine in the School of Computer Science here at CMU. The machine was to live in the SCS-access-only grad-student lounge. It had to stand up to serving many hundreds of cups of coffee each day, be push-button automated, store and chill milk (for latte, etc.), and self-clean frequently enough to keep the county health department happy.
The expensive part of this set of requirements is the "push-button automated" and "self-clean frequently enough to keep the county health department happy." Our machine steam-cleans the milk lines and brewing chamber every 15 minutes. This reduces needed cleanings by trained people to once each 24 hours. It also raises the price of the machine well above $10K.
The big machines you see Barristas using at coffee shops cost substantially less -- "only" $2K-$5K. They require trained operators (for both food safety and operator safety), regular cleaning every couple of hours, and are full-manual operation. This is not appropriate for unattended operation by any of a group of several thousand people with no training.
Xenophon
P.S. The first espresso machine paid for itself in less than one year. Then, before being flogged to death, it sold enough coffee to pay for the current much more expensive and much higher duty-cycle machine.