Coffee in France now

In France one barely sees a human make coffee today. All the hotels have machines where you press a button to select your type of coffee and a machine spits it out. Only in the town of Carhaix in Brittany thus far did I find a human who actually made me a coffee, and it was in the foulest dive bar one can imagine. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes despite the fact that I'm pretty sure you can't smoke inside (there was an ashtray just outside that hadn't been emptied in weeks, seemingly). And I only found that after going into a small restaurant and asking for a coffee (there was a machine behind the bar) only to be rebuffed: "No no, we're just a restaurant." Up the way a bit there was another guy shutting down a Turkish restaurant for the day and I asked him where one might get a coffee. "Je ne sais pas" was all I got out of that slack motherfucker.

And this was no garden spot, mind you. There was one quaintish street down which a few bicycle tourists pedaled, but even there there were some vacant store fronts. It was worse on the high street. You'd think in a town like that those in the hospitality industry would want to be hospitable. You'd be wrong.

Once more I digress. Back to the "only machines make coffee" thread. I get it. Human labor is expensive and sometimes scarce, though there are plenty of immigrants willing to work. Making coffee is, the protestations of the tattooed and pierced baristas of the world notwithstanding, much more a science than an art. I get that it is easily automatable and the coffee we've been drinking is fine, though Europe no longer has much of a leg up on America in the coffee game. Still, it's wierd that all of my coffee in France has been self-serve from a machine. 

On the positive side, it makes it much easier to get a refill.