Comment by miki123211
6 hours ago
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.
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.
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...
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.