[Cougher]

Yes. They'd hire someone like Wayne Dyer to develop treatment plans at a psychiatric hospital. My favorite personal example was when my employer hired a management engineering consultant company to help people who spent their time in meetings to trim fat, i.e., fire people who did the work. One of the ways that was used to help us dumb people understand what a quality product is was to ask us which restuarant has a higher quality product: a gourmet steakhouse or McDonald's. The answer? It was supposed to be a 'gotcha' of course. People inevitably answered the "gourmet steakhouse", but our brilliant teacher laid down some truth that day: McDonald's is of equally high quality because they do very well at providing a consistent product throughout all of their franchises. I told her that there's a difference between consistency and quality. A consistently low quality product is still a low quality product. Management just didn't get it. This was at a time in the early 90s when my employers touted themselves as being a "World Class Hospital". What kind of claim is that when American hospitals were world beaters?

[perl4ever]

This is such a cliche about consistency anyway. Who says they are consistent? The whole thing about franchising is they are independent businesses, and McDonald's isn't harmed if a given one does terribly and goes out of business.

Certainly after some critical mass, you don't have to be as consistent to retain customers. We all know how first impressions matter at any job.