"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here.
I beg to differ with analogy (though not the rest of your post). The "uncanny valley" is a hypothetical situation where a construct is unpleasant because it seems human but not human enough [1]. The (supposed) solution to the uncanny valley effect is for a thing to seem more human.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is a corporation here really isn't your friend. The corporation aims to sell as much to you as possible at the highest mark-up possible. No amount of them improving the experience is going to change that.
The nice things about a local cafe have to incidentally nice. The cafe isn't a better designed experience some better designer has created to make more money, since then you'd be paying for every personalism of this service.
I beg to differ with analogy (though not the rest of your post). The "uncanny valley" is a hypothetical situation where a construct is unpleasant because it seems human but not human enough [1]. The (supposed) solution to the uncanny valley effect is for a thing to seem more human.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is a corporation here really isn't your friend. The corporation aims to sell as much to you as possible at the highest mark-up possible. No amount of them improving the experience is going to change that.
The nice things about a local cafe have to incidentally nice. The cafe isn't a better designed experience some better designer has created to make more money, since then you'd be paying for every personalism of this service.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley