The moment you walk into a café and place an order for a coffee, your mind naturally jumps straight to the final moment: drinking the cup you love. From your side, it feels like a simple exchange: place the order, get the drink, and then move on with your day. But on the other side of the counter, the person taking your order might be running on the remnants of a 14-hour shift. They could be counting the hours left before a long bus ride home, or navigating the daily pressures that come with the job. And all of that lives invisibly behind the cup of coffee they offer you. Yet, what if their reality was visible? What if, beyond the final product in our hands, we also acknowledged the chain of decisions, pressures, and life events the employee carries? What if we viewed them as people first, not as disposable labor? Over the past few months, global headlines have been dominated by a growing shift towards blue-collar jobs as Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to surpass many white-collar tasks. While most discussions focus on how AI is threatening white-collar…
