Buffalo Shop Gets Hate Mail Over Menu. Owner Apologizes. The Internet Remains Awful.
Megi Endeladze, a coffee shop owner in Buffalo, used AI to create her fall menu artwork and promotional designs. After the menu went viral, she received what she described as 'personal attacks' and 'messages' and posted an Instagram apology stating the shop would no longer use AI for menu artwork or promo designs.
This demonstrates what sociologists call a 'normative backlash cycle.' When a behavior violates an emerging community standard, the response often scales beyond the original offense. The mechanism here is performative outrage: the punishment exceeds the transgression, which tells you the anger was never really about the menu. The lesson for any operator is that adopting AI visibly carries a reputational risk that has nothing to do with the technology itself and everything to do with audience expectations of authenticity.
Megi Endeladze, a small business coffee shop owner in Buffalo. She posted her apology to Instagram and was covered by Business Insider in September 2026.
- If you run a small business, audit your current marketing materials and identify which pieces use AI-generated artwork versus human-created designs.
- Post a transparent note to your social media explaining your process, what tools you used, and why. Do not apologize unless you actually changed your mind.
- Set a personal policy before the next project: decide which tasks are AI-assisted and which are human-created, and communicate that choice to customers before someone else decides for you.