The entropy heat death of Starbucks?

Synchronicity is coffee related blog posts from both Doc Searls and Blogorelli arriving in one’s aggregator on the same day. Granted, it was Tuesday; I’m a little behind.

Anyway: first Doc Searls pointed out Howard Schultz’s mail to his troops about how Starbucks’s growth has endangered the customer experience in its stores. Doc further opines that the “milking down” of the experience has endangered the core product.

I would concur: I thought the chain was in trouble from a soul perspective ever since, in the late 1990s, it started heavily promoting Frappucinos. Why? Because a Frappucino is a lot of ice, sugar, and milk with coffee flavoring; it’s not really a coffee drink. I believe at the time it was a creative response to a short term supply constraint (there was a big spike in coffee prices at the time), but over time the milk has drowned the coffee. Nasty-ass flavored lattés are just the logical evolution.

Still, there’s part of me that pauses when I read Doc’s recommendations. One is to “go back to real commercial espresso machines. Too many Starbucks now feature automated machines that any idiot can use. I don’t know what you call these things, but they are made to move customers through faster…” I pause when I read this, because I’m the guy who gets nervous when there are more than two people ahead of him in line at Starbucks and the line is not moving. Yesterday in the airport, in fact, there were two “baristas” (neither of whom would last a second in Seattle), who were each taking and then filling their own orders—no division of labor, no checking ahead to get drinks for the next person in line—and it took forever to get through and get my coffee. Why can’t that be sped up?

Because, of course, if you want quick coffee you don’t get to cavil about the quality of the preparation experience, or ask for the company to put in slower machines. But if you want fast coffee, why not just get McDonalds to do it? The answer is, of course, we all want to feel special, like we have a personal relationship with our coffee. What’s the best thing about going to Starbucks regularly? That the barista knows who you are and starts making your drink when you walk in the door. That is such the opposite of the mass market experience. So is the fact that I expect Starbucks to be clean, the employees to be intelligent and lively, and the other customers to be professionals. So maybe my expectations for Starbucks are classist?

Something else comes into the mix, of course: Blogorelli points to the newest East Coast trend of high service espresso bars, featuring ristretto shots, freshly roasted beans, and (most visibly) foam art on the lattes. (The article doesn’t mention it, but really good baristas can do a leaf pattern in the crema on top of a plain espresso shot even without any cream.) Having experienced this in Seattle four years ago, I can say it’s a pretty amazing difference from Starbucks and is clearly where the leading edge customer is going. So the question is, can Starbucks follow this customer?

Put another way, there are two markets for coffee drinkers: those who love coffee, and everyone else. Can Starbucks really continue to try to serve both? Or will its efforts continue to disorder its brand until it loses all momentum and is overtaken by another competitor?

Airport Extreme Disappointment

My new Airport Extreme (the 802.11n model) is set up and humming, and everything looks good—better range, easier setup, better form factor. So why am I extremely disappointed?

Because it won’t share my RAID disk, and Apple won’t help me figure out how to make it happen. In fact, I had to go to their support forum to find out that the base station appears to have issues with RAID disks.

The good news is that I don’t have even 500 GB of content on the RAID disk, so theoretically I can back up the data, break the RAID set, and rebuild everything on the 500 GB volume.

The bad news: Back up the data to where? Hopefully I can find a way to move the music to a loaner disk or something.

And of course that’s just the first step. Next comes moving the iTunes library file off the old PowerBook, rebuilding it so that it points to the new disk—hopefully without losing all my playcount data this time! Then testing: synching the iPod, ripping a disc, copying music to the remote disk. The real question is, how many iTunes scenarios are bearable with a remote disk across an 802.11g network? And: will Apple or someone else come out with an 802.11n compatible card for the first generation MacBook Pro so that I can actually use the 802.11n features of the base station?

What blows me away, of course, is that this was a completely avoidable thing. The Mac has had support for software RAID for many years, and with a lot of people embracing digital lifestyles thanks to Apple, the likelihood that there are going to be a few people caught by this is pretty high.

Chicago, Chicago: that stop on the way home

I awake in the Windy City this morning, having arrived here late last night and checked into the Palmer House Hilton. It’s funny how a place like Vegas changes your perspective. Normally, I like the historical flavor of a place like the Palmer House, which is 135 years old and heavy on the scenery, particularly in the lobby. But after a few days at the Venetian, all I could think of when I stepped into my room was, This is tiny. In my defense, I think I was influenced primarily by my long ride in the middle seat and secondarily by the extensive plywood hiding the restoration work in the aforementioned lobby, which kind of cooled the impact.

So: down to breakfast, and then home. And then tomorrow: jury duty. Yay.

Zune Phone to suck just as hard as the Zune…

As someone who is counting the days until his current Cingular contract expires in June so that he can pick up an iPhone, I thought the rumor that Microsoft was planning a Zune branded phone was pretty funny. Because, of course, the Zune brand has shown such market power to date that it has completely destroyed the iPod’s hold on the market.

Oh, wait. It hasn’t? Um, never mind.

But the take of the Crazy Apple Rumors Site on this rumor is one of the funnier things I’ve read in a while:

Beyond just the name, however, sources indicate that the Zellular Phone Call will have certain limitations inherited from the Zune platform.

For example, all calls will be wrapped in Microsoft’s DRM and the end-user license agreement will state that the contents of each call will be the property of Microsoft in perpetuity. Also, the Zellular Phone Call will only allow you to call someone three times. After that, every time you try to call that person you will hear a recording of a representative of the Recording Industry Association of America calling you a thief and yelling obscenities and threats at you.

Heh.

Waiting for American

Leaving Las Vegas today (and yes, that would probably have made a better blog post title). Just wrapped up two days at the Pink Elephant conference at the Venetian. It was an interesting time—a lighter crowd than in past years for this conference, and coming in on Sunday night while the crowd for the NBA All Star game was still in town was a little… chaotic.

Getting out of town has been a little worrisome, too. The rumor coming back to the Venetian was that Southwest had overbooked their outgoing flights by about 40%, resulting in 9-hour-long lines at the ticket counters and a general swamping of the airport on Monday. It was pretty straightforward today, though.

Alas, I’m not going straight home; one more business meeting in Chicago calls. But after that I am back to Boston. Thank goodness.

Oh, and the big disappointment of the conference? No Beatles karaoke.

A suspicious award

Chris Riggs, a former partner in crime in my days in the Suspicious Cheese Lords, emailed me and other former members tonight to announce that the group won a Wammie—a Washington Area Music Association award—for choral group, classical. Considering that past Wammie classical winners have included Hesperus, Leonard Slatkin, the National Symphony, and Denyce Graves, this is a Big Deal indeed. Many congrats to the guys; I only wish I could have been there to see the award.

Update: Here is the full list of 2006 winners from the WAMA site.

Within Your Reach

Artist: The Replacements
Album: Hootenanny

I could live without so much
I can die without a clue
Sun keeps risin’ in the west
I keep on wakin’ fully confused

I never seen no mountain
Never swam no sea
City got me drownin’
I guess it’s up to me

I can’t live without your touch (2x)

Cold without so much
Can die without a dream
Live without your touch
I’ll die within your reach

Reach
Reach

I never seen no mountain
Never swam no sea
Drownin’ in this city
Well, it’s really up to me

I can’t live without your touch (3x)

Die within your reach
Die within your reach
Die within your reach
Die within your reach

Reach
Die within your
Reach
Die within your
Reach

Bruno, Farewell

I found Bruno in the first semester of my business school program, about a month into my first serious depression, during which I was confronting all my deepest fears about having uprooted my life and put myself into debt. It was good to find Bruno and realize that all the suffering had happened, much more definitively, before.

This was about six or seven years ago, a little over a third of the way through her absolutely ingenious run, during which she railed against the dying of the light, the conventional discomforts of life, and went through to reinvent everything in her life from first principles. Her end today has me feeling bittersweet. Yes, she appears to have finally accepted that she is worthy of happiness, that the love of her friends can be accepted without guilt, that life is sweet amidst the bitterness.

Or, as only Bruno could say, after her distant inamorata of many years proposes finding a place to live together,

Because, really, that’s the only way to get through life.

I couldn’t be happier to have been able to be a patron to Chris during the latter years of the strip. I also couldn’t be happier that he will focus his energies going forward on Little Dee, which already has some of the loony greatness of Pogo about it. Can you imagine a world where Chris Baldwin is in your morning paper? I for one can’t imagine a world without his work. As sad as I am to bid farewell to Bruno’s story, I look forward to the next chapter from Chris with eagerness.

Icy irony

This morning my coworker and I chipped a half-inch of ice off the rental car and trundled over to our prospective customer’s offices. By mid-afternoon most of the roads were clear, the ice and snow had stopped, the sun was shining, and flights were proceeding out of Columbus.

Except, of course, those flights in the direction of Boston.

Yes, my flight was canceled. Though the weather is OK in Columbus, it’s crappy in Boston so those flights were delayed and canceled. At least I got an early morning flight back, so I can get the driveway shoveled out before business gets started.

I did get lucky in one respect. One of our customers suggested that Easton Town Center was a pretty good place near the airport to stay if I needed to get a hotel room. That tip put me in walking distance of a half dozen places to eat and a bookstore—much better than the airport food options. I even found Leffe Blonde on tap (though admittedly that’s easier than it once was—kudos to their distribution people).

Wikipedia, Google News Archives, and the Good Old Song

I’ve tagged this as being about Virginia because the subject matter is probably most interesting to those interested in UVA, my alma mater, but some of it is probably of more general interest. So, first things first: the Virginia Glee Club has a stub of a Wikipedia page that needs some help. So I went about to help it. I added a brief paragraph about the origins of the Club as a student group called the Cabell House Men, then went in search of documentation. As it turns out, the Cabell House Men are scarce fellows indeed.

But in digging through Google’s various features, I found the news archives, a front end to the paywalled deep content of a bunch of newspapers that featured some really interesting paydirt on the Club that I called home and that formed me in some significant ways. Among the findings, as gleaned from article summaries since I didn’t feel like spending $30 or $40 in reprints tonight, I learned that the Glee Club

So much, and so little, has changed.

Interestingly, I also found reference in Google Books that the Club seemingly disappeared for a few years prior to 1910-1911, which I hadn’t heard before.

And of course, there was that Washington appearance in which Bill Clinton himself gave us a shoutout, on Thomas Jefferson’s 250th anniversary: “I want to begin by offering my compliments to the United States Marine Band and the Virginia Glee Club, who have entertained us so well today…” Read that speech; it’s almost unimaginable coming from the current sitting president, but back then it was so routine as to be almost unnoticed.

Oh yeah, and the Good Old Song? Turns out it’s a meta-alma mater, a song in memory of the real Song of Wa-Hoo-Wah, long vanished, and at least according to this author a racist imitation of a Native American chant that originated at Dartmouth of all places.

Lessons? There’s more online than lives in Google’s main index…

Just don’t call him Katie

One day a New York Giant, the next day a Today show correspondent: Virginia star Tiki Barber made a big jump this week into the wacky world of broadcasting. His new position on the Today show as a news correspondent makes him the second high-profile Virginia alum there in recent memory and the first since Katie Couric left to become CBS’s anchor. Which, of course, means that Matt Lauer needs to watch his ass.

The icing on the cake

I’m back in sunny Columbus, Ohio for a few days—just in time for a nice winter storm. It snowed all night, fortunately only about a foot accumulation, but it turned into ice about noon today.

This trip has been a lot of work, but so far the actual travel experience has been easier. I got to the hotel about 11 pm, got a good night’s sleep, will get to nap for a bit before dinner… all sorts of good stuff.

My only weather related worry, in fact, is that I have my very nicest wingtips and no other shoes. It’s a good thing Ohio doesn’t salt roads the way Massachusetts does, or the leather would already be totally destroyed.

The other Cleveland

What can be said about Cleveland, Tennessee? Perhaps its ambassador, the Diplomat Motel, a sagging fleabag of odd smells and rusty plumbing, sitting as it does at the fringe of a used car lot, tells part of the story. But then, any $35 hotel room is probably an unfair representation of the city in which it sits. How about this: less than a mile up the road from the Diplomat is a shopping center with a brand new Starbucks, with wifi and high school kids who joke that slinging coffee for the rest of their lives would be a desirable career—a joke because they know they can and will do much more.

Actually, the above probably says as much about Starbucks as anything else.

Night flight

There is something melancholic about waiting around the ass end of Logan—the AirTran gate known as 1C—for the last flight to Atlanta. There is something even more melancholic in knowing that when I land, I’ll have to make my way across the airport to the rental cars and drive another two hours into the heart of Tennessee. Ah well. It beats waiting for a flight to Chattanooga.