alt Hacker NewsA 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.)
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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.
I would love to tour a coffee company (or a chocolate company). Two of my favorite things. :)
> 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”
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.
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.