I don't see it catching on unless some business will pony up 30 cents for each logo'd magnet.
So, you can pour a beer faster? The article says 56 beers/minute (It's not at all realistic that a person could actually do this, because they couldn't even open up the bags of cups quick enough, not to mention set them on top of the pourers, etc !) So, let's say that one person can realistically do 20/minute....still far faster than the 4/minute that they could probably do otherwise.
Let's say the employees are making minimum wage at $7.25 an hour...because that's the likely scenario.
If one person is pouring 20 beers a minute, they can pour 1200 an hour with the new pouring system. The new cups are .30 each ($360) and their wage is $7.25 for a total of $367.25 to pour those 1200 beers.
We won't get into the cost of the beer itself, since that's a constant.
To pour those 1200 beers at the "4 per minute" speed of regular cups it would take 5 employees. (4 per minute X 60 minutes is 240 cups per hour, so 5 employees at 240 cups each would be needed to fill 1200 cups per hour).
Using regular cups with as assumed cost of 1 cent per cup, to fill those same 1200 cups you would have a cost of $12 for the cups and $36.25 for salaries (5 employees at $7.25 per hour).
So, using the regular cups would cost $48.25 to fill 1200 beers and using these new cups would cost $367.25, or $319 more.
That's why I say that there's nothing in real-world practicality that makes these better than regular cups unless they find a sponsor to pay the full .30 per cup in ad space for the disc.....not at all likely.
And yes, there are some other factors, but they're likely to be balanced by the fact that someone who is pouring beers and getting tips is probably making less than minimum wage as well.
So..... what Tom said: "Solution in search of a problem"
