[ivraatiems]

A few years ago, I got a tour of Starbucks headquarters from a friend. One thing I didn't expect: it's literally filled with rooms where people just taste coffee, all day, every day, to make sure it's what it's supposed to be.

It's crazy how even something which feels mediocre so much of the time - fast-food coffee, a budget airline - requires an enormous amount of human effort to pull off reliably.

(And yes, you can dislike Southwest as a corporation and still think things like flight attendant training and plane simulators are cool. Come on folks.)

[claw-el]

Sometimes, large corporation values consistency above one-off excellence. It’s how they build their brand (the promise of consistency).

I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.

[walrus01]

Consistency and predictability is considered extremely important for large franchise operations (or corporate-run chains). People want exactly the same sausage patty and egg croissant in St. John's Newfoundland as they can get in San Diego, California.

Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.

But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.

[khazhoux]

> filled with rooms where people just taste coffee, all day, every day, to make sure it's what it's supposed to be.

I’m picturing a room of tasters going “bitter, acrid, off-putting… approved”

[KatiMichel]

I would love to tour a coffee company (or a chocolate company). Two of my favorite things. :)

[vtbassmatt]

If you ever find yourself in Raleigh, Videri Chocolate offers tours! https://viderichocolatefactory.com/

[KatiMichel]

I actually was in Durham for DjangoCon US a couple of times. One year I was on the fence about making a quick trip to Raleigh before my flight and that factory was one on my list. It was a very rainy day, and I was pretty tired. I decided not to go. Hopefully, I will make it back sometime. Maybe for All Things Open, which is on my bucket list.

[205guy]

The island of Kaua'i in Hawaii has both tours of a chocolate farm (Lydgate Farms) and a coffee plantation (Kaua'i Coffee) with a visitor center. Just gotta find a conference out there, then hop on a Southwest flight.

[HaZeust]

Highly recommend Hammond's in Denver CO as an amazing FREE candy/chocolate factory tour:

https://hammondscandies.com/products/hammonds-factory-tour

https://hammondscandies.com/pages/factory-tours-new

[chihuahua]

There's a place in Hamburg called "Chocoversum" that offers a good tour, explaining and demonstrating the whole chocolate making process.

[thaumasiotes]

The USDA employs professional tasters so that it can continue to grade the "quality" of butter, where quality is defined as tasting the way that, in the official opinion of the US government, butter should taste. There are no non-flavor considerations that go into grading butter, and yet somehow this is an important legal duty of the government.

[miki123211]

This is why Starbucks and mcDonalds win over mom-and-pop.

If you have this kind of scale, you can do crazy things. You have enough data to AB test every single decision, not necessarily even via customer surveillance, you can just have half of the restaurants do A and the other half do B for a month, and then compare results. You can optimize the hell out of everything. You can do focus group testing to discover what customers really want. You can hire the world's foremost expert in chair design to design chairs which fulfill your business goals.

If you're a mom-and-pop, you go off on vibes and on "Karen Smith posted an angry review on Google Maps and she mentioned that the coffee tasted bad, so let's change the coffee."

Apps like Uber Eats change this dynamic a bit, as they can use the power of 0-marginal-cost software to write some of these optimizations once, and then deliver them to all their customers, no matter how small, sometimes without those customers' explicit knowledge.

[davemp]

I’m not sure how you could suggest starbucks and mcdonalds outcompete based on product quality or ambiance. Have you been to a random mom&pop coffee or burger spot recently?

Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.

The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.

They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.

[FinnKuhn]

While mostly correct it is missing that not all customers in all stores want the same.

Customers in store A might have wildly different preferences to customers in store B. Starbucks can't account for that - small stores can.

[butlike]

You gave me an idea I've not thought about before: whether large corporations view peripheral companies (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc.) as friends or enemies...