$25k robot barista can serve 120 cups of coffee per hour

Today, the average Starbucks barista makes an average total pay of $23,507, when you factor in pay, bonuses, benefits, tips, and additional compensation. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes they’re not. It’s a crapshoot. (It’s worse if they’re sporting a hipster mustache.)

But what if Starbucks was able to substitute these human baristas for robotic baristas?

That’s what one company, the Ammunition Group, is attempting to do with CafeX.

The San Francisco company launched its own coffee shop in San Francisco that is operated by a six-axis animatronic arm that makes 120 cups of coffee per hour.

Here is what customers do: you order your coffee through a touhscreen kiosk (or mobile app), wait for your coffee to be made, and then pick it up.

You can see the robot in action:

Officials say they don’t want to replace baristas.

“We’re not trying to replace baristas or that relationship customers have with them,” said Victoria Slaker, Ammunition’s vice president of product design, in an interview with CNBC. “But we saw an opportunity to make something more beautiful and more interesting than a standard vending machine that could also pour a mean cup of coffee.”

But it can be very tempting for your local Starbucks or Tim Hortons to swap humans for robots.

Think about it: a first-time investment of $25,000, which is about $2,000 more than what you pay per employee per year, can save the average coffee shop hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.