SACRAMENTO, CA — Following California Governor Gavin Newsom's passage of a bill that raises minimum wage at many fast food restaurants to $20 an hour, Starbucks managers scrambled to find automated cashiers with enough tattoos and piercings to adequately represent their brand.
"It's a struggle, for sure," Starbucks hiring manager David Luna reported. "Finding worker robots that we don't have to pay $20 an hour that also look the part of what people expect when they walk into one of our stores; pink hair, piercings, smug, aloof attitude — it's been hard."
Governor Newsom signed the bill into law this week, mandating a $20 minimum wage at most fast-food joints around the state. In response, many locations, including Starbucks, have been looking to replace high-cost humans with low-cost robots.
"I was programmed to state my pronouns every ten seconds and I even have a ‘Love is Love' tattoo on my right flange," one robotic Starbucks employment candidate told reporters. "But I was eventually disqualified from employment for not allowing BIPOC customers to cut to the front of the line. BEEP. BOOOP."
As of publishing time, Starbucks announced it was planning on designing its own fleet of automated cashiers that can haughtily ignore customers for up to 10 minutes while complaining to coworkers about the evils of capitalism and write "FREE PALESTINE" on up to 45 coffee cups an hour.
Citing concerns about stiff competition from Amazon and an impossible-to-please Gen Z, Santa has announced he's hanging up the hat for good.
