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Starbucks, monetary superpower

jpkoning.blogspot.com

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Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#111

Post by hef19898 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #107
mbesto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was eye opening to consider how legally complex many such 'simple' things, like gift cards, are when implemented on a wide scale. To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run ". Here is your answer. Note - to be fair, yes many of these team are indeed bloated and work on projects that are a result of NIH syndrome, where "buy vs build" decisions just automatically default to "build".…

> Ask anyone at Amazon if they enjoy working with the code on their custom internal ERP system and you'll know what I'm talking about. Can you elaborate?

Not from the tech teams, but I used to be on one of their ops teams working with ERP system. Having quite some experience with SAP before and since I came to the following conclusion:

- Amazon's ERP is way better suited for e-commerce ops than SAP - SAP is much better as an overall ERP system when it comes to include non-ops / warehouse management functions - Amazon's ERP system became hard to adopt and change, meaning it kind of lost the general advantage of a custom system to compared to an off the shelf one - One of the biggest advantages of Amazon's ERP was the full integration of the webshop front end - One of the biggest mistakes Amazon made was to not develop their ERP-webshop systems into a stand-alone product (imagine Shopify with a arguably very good e-commerce ERP system)

Let me elaborate on the last point. The big strength of commercial ERP systems is that they are to large part a readily available collection of best practices from countless companies. By keeping it all in-house Amazon lost that opportunity to learn. IMHO it is not the system that gives Amazon the edge but the way it is used, so incorporating eyternal best practices coupd only help. Also, from the commercial side, it is one gigantic missed opportunity. Imagine a SaaS version of Amazon's ERP running all the shops currently using stuff like Shopifyone that is used by countless small stores as a point of sale software with integrated inventory ans warehouse management functions. That would allow Amazon to create a global, decentralized ERP environment fully integrated into any existing or future fulfillment solutions Amazon has. The upside for Amazon and users of such a system are basically endless.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#112

Post by lsc »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #106
paganel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest some of those smaller merchants can also make better coffee than Starbucks, and as such they can ask for slightly higher prices for said better coffee without their customers complaining.

No one goes to Starbucks for the high quality of their coffee. They go for convenience, maybe atmosphere (a safe comfortable place to hang for awhile), and such. But if you want great coffee, that is a trade off that doesn’t favor Starbucks (like a burger conesuire at McDonald’s).

>maybe atmosphere (a safe comfortable place to hang for awhile),

So I mean, coffee shops in general, yes. But at least in urban areas? Starbucks seems to be really well-designed to maximize throughput and profit; they have fewer seats, usually per cup of coffee sold than the smaller coffee places, and generally seem to be set up for 'to go'.

It's one of those things where if I look at it as an investor, I really like it, but if I look at it as a consumer, the opposite.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#113

Post by jasim »

jimmaswell wrote: post #98
mbesto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was eye opening to consider how legally complex many such 'simple' things, like gift cards, are when implemented on a wide scale. To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run ". Here is your answer. Note - to be fair, yes many of these team are indeed bloated and work on projects that are a result of NIH syndrome, where "buy vs build" decisions just automatically default to "build".…

So bloated sets of laws necessitate bloated teams.

More generally, reality just gets more nuanced as things go broader or deeper in scope. Toy projects are clean, uncluttered; production code needs error handling, logging, monitoring, scaling, and much more.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#114

Post by sudhirj »

Shameless plug, If anyone’s building one of these cards, I made a wallet microservice (https://github.com/sudhirj/notecase) for a movie ticket site I work on (justickets.in)

It’ll let you track recharges, spends and balances for your customers, we use it for nearly a million customers.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#115

Post by sudhirj »

sudhirj wrote: post #114

Shameless plug, If anyone’s building one of these cards, I made a wallet microservice ( https://github.com/sudhirj/notecase ) for a movie ticket site I work on (justickets.in) It’ll let you track recharges, spends and balances for your customers, we use it for nearly a million customers.

Docs are here https://notecase.docs.apiary.io

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

mbesto wrote: post #91
Diederich wrote: post #30

15 or so years ago, my manager at WalMart Stores Information Systems Division was previously a programmer on one of the many finance related teams. Specifically, she worked with gift cards, and one time I asked her how different state laws affected how much money WalMart could recover from those cards. She was delighted to elaborate! I don't recall the particulars of the answer, but it was eye-opening. She said that…

> It was eye opening to consider how legally complex many such 'simple' things, like gift cards, are when implemented on a wide scale. To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run ". Here is your answer. Note - to be fair, yes many of these team are indeed bloated and work on projects that are a result of NIH syndrome, where "buy vs build" decisions just automatically default to "build".…

> To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run ". Here is your answer.

I think the usual question isn't why a random SV app yas 1k engineers, but why does it have The answer is the same, but let's be clear: this is not an engineering job. It's legal and sales job.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#117

Post by dragonwriter »

modo_ wrote: post #37
Diederich wrote: post #30

15 or so years ago, my manager at WalMart Stores Information Systems Division was previously a programmer on one of the many finance related teams. Specifically, she worked with gift cards, and one time I asked her how different state laws affected how much money WalMart could recover from those cards. She was delighted to elaborate! I don't recall the particulars of the answer, but it was eye-opening. She said that…

I'm curious if a rules engine [1] could be used instead of implementing the logic in code for something this complicated? Could fuzzy logic be used to build a case when the laws become contradictory? Maybe after the case is built it could be passed on to legal counsel for approval. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rules_engine

> I'm curious if a rules engine [1] could be used instead of implementing the logic in code for something this complicated?

Rules engine rules are code; just code in a language that is usually very simple but also (because it's not used anywhere else) completely obscure.

> Could fuzzy logic be used to build a case when the laws become contradictory?

Didn't the Bayesians kill fuzzy logic?

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#118

Post by csomar »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #95
kgwgk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starbucks doesn’t operate in Spain: https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2016/grupo-vips-takes-...

That link was from 2016. They do now! https://goo.gl/maps/oVQLjLTgbYzCdDPNA

Google street shows that they were operating from 2014.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#119

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

airstrike wrote: post #77
lwf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have a credit or debit card it's one of the only ways to pay for the service, save asking to borrow a friend's card. According to the FDIC, 6.5% of American households lacked a bank account at all in 2017.[1] [1]: https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/

But you could always go with one those reloadable debit cards, no? Though those usually come with a fixed setup fee of, say, $5

Reloadable debit cards nickle and dime you with as many ridiculous fees as possible. A poor tax basically.

Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower

#120

Post by hombre_fatal »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #108
eswat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I fund my Netflix account using digital gift cards purchased through PayPal's eBay store, since they frequently sell them at a 15% discount. If it wasn’t for that I would just pay Netflix directly.

...how exactly are they selling $1 for 85c?

Liquid cash is worth more than store credit. Your "$1" is actually 1 StoreBuck.
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