It’s clear they did not walk out.

By the time I placed my order - paying a 1% fee to the app makers in the process - I would have happily paid double for the experience of simply flipping through a menu and talking to another human being.

(Emphasis mine.) This is from the very next paragraph after what I quoted.

You also clearly missed the point of my comment, which is that unless consumers start refusing to take this bullshit lying down, this stuff will be unavoidable in the future because there will be no other choices left.

That’s assuming the employees give enough of a shit to pass the feedback on to the owners, and that the owners give enough of a shit to listen.

Yeah, it’s better if you make it known why you’re not giving them your business, but if it doesn’t appreciably impact their revenue then most owners won’t care either way.

My phone struggled to load the site to order a single cold brew, pop-ups to install the custom App kept obscuring the options, and I had to register with my phone number, email address, and first and last name to buy a $5 cup of coffee.

Then walk out. Don’t reward the bullshit with your money. The coffee shop ain’t gonna give a shit if you keep buying coffee just to go home and complain on your blog.

Fortunately, most of my family is so tech illiterate that even if a real video got out, I could just tell them it’s a deepfake and they’d probably believe me.