Based on the recent post about the disposable Montreal subway tickets with a super cheap nfc chip (and amusingly on a paper ticket with a a printed on fake smart chip connection) it should be super cheap to have an automated kiosk that pairs your drink order to a paper cup that when a barista swipes shows your cup your order shows up or fills it automatically.
Seems like it would be cheaper to have a simple QR code be thermally printed on the cup. A fraction of a penny's worth of chemical spritz on the bottom of the cup would do the trick.
I wish but tbh coffee is probably artificially cheaper than it really should be since larger corporations exploit local farms and effectively maintain local monopolies where farms have to sell to said corporations for a fraction of the price it's actually worth.
Ha, well, there is a disturbing reason why computer vision with ultra-cheap hardware is possible: countries all over the world are buying these by the billions in order to keep an eye on their citizens :-(
Big brother is enabling incredible economies of scale....
Maybe it's not the chip that it's too cheap. Maybe it's the coffee that's too expensive.