191–200 of 273 posts
The Founder is a movie that tells the story of the birth and growth of McDonald's ( https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_founder/ ), and it covers much of the ground covered in this article. In addition to being a very well-done movie, it does a superb job of describing the relationship between the visionary founders of a startup, and the sales guys and bean counters who turn it into a successful business. It doesn't…
Kroc was just as visionary, if also greedy and manipulative and ready to succeed at all costs. He's clearly not afraid to steal a business or wife. He's also somehow easy to relate to (thanks Keaton).
You can see him lying to himself and justifying his actions. Got the feeling that Kroc wasn't all that different from many SV founders. You don't go to SV to make a burger stand, you go there to make an empire. There's a reason Kroc is discussed in business schools.
On a side note, reading about the founding of Twitter there's a lot this kind of back and forth.
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
I know it's a serious worry, but seems like one of those good problems to have.
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Perhaps that explains why their coffee tastes awful.
Their coffee tastes awful for the same reason that McD's makes awful food: it's optimized for standardization/consistency. Starbucks roasts all their coffee to relatively exorbitant degrees to cover up the inconsistency brought about by their very-multi-origin sourcing. Some Starbucks locations sell "single origin" coffee which tastes quite a bit better, if only because they don't have to hide the variance in taste a…
So it takes some effort to make it taste that bad. Keep up the good work SB!
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Kinda OT, but that's why I never buy physically large food items at McD's: the quicker you eat it the warmer it is. Also, the quicker you eat it, the less you have to think about it; and most of McD's food items do not bear much thinking about.
Just customize your order in such a way that they have to make it fresh. I don't eat raw tomatoes, so if I tell them not to put those on my burger/wrap/whatever I end up getting freshly made food that's even hot.
On a similar note, I hate the "exploit" of "Ask for fries with no salt to get them to make you a fresh batch of fries" when you can just ask them to make you a fresh batch of fries. Potatoes are about $6 per hundred pounds; they could not care less about making you a fresh batch if it means chucking the old fries out.
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Somehow I don't trust your own judgment of your ability as a child, especially when it is in contrast with the experience of most people and the findings of researchers.
I recall it exactly. When you start to trust theory over reality I'm sure you've taken a bad turn.
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Perhaps that explains why their coffee tastes awful.
Their coffee tastes awful for the same reason that McD's makes awful food: it's optimized for standardization/consistency. Starbucks roasts all their coffee to relatively exorbitant degrees to cover up the inconsistency brought about by their very-multi-origin sourcing. Some Starbucks locations sell "single origin" coffee which tastes quite a bit better, if only because they don't have to hide the variance in taste a…
I can grab a coffee and sit down with my laptop in Portland, Boston, or Yuma, and I will have the exact same mediocre experience. I don't care about having a transcendent coffee journey; I care about getting a predictable cup of coffee, a kinda-comfortable space, and wifi to check my email. That's it.
I can hunt for some coffeeshop that might be great or might be awful, or I can head into the local Starbucks and know exactly what I'm going to get.
I wonder why this is sitting at the stop when the MS critique with less votes in less time in at the bottom of the page? Hacker News story placement can be confusing at times. I would understand if they have some tech centric metric somehow, but this isn't even tech?
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Personally, anything that is counterintuitive or surprising gratifies my intellectual curiosity. "You thought that X was important for this business, but you've been bamboozled this whole time! It's actually Y!"
The discussion has introduced a couple of great documentaries as well as anecdotes from people who have worked in similar circumstances in retail, (i.e. the business is important, but the valuable real estate that they're sitting on is even more important) so I don't have a problem with this sort of submission.
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> And it isn't as though a drop in temperature of 5 degrees changes the flavor. Leaving aside the rest of the discussion, and not even addressing if throwing it out was good/fine, this line stood out to me. I often feel that temperature changes the taste. More obvious in ranges > 5 degrees, but still noticeable at that range. Given how subjective taste is, it's hard to prove, though I'm sure some neurologist has hook…
It's well known that the current temperature changes the taste. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/19/temperature-can-eff... But, I think his comment was changing the temperature is easy, and having food get cold does not change the taste after reheating. However, there is a large food safety issue with how long food stays between 40f and 140f, which is probably the root cause of this policy.
This is as untrue as saying temperature doesn't affect flavor; cooling/reheating cycles affect flavor and texture of food.
"They used to hold the promise of good fast-food but now the food is neither fast, nor good. In fact, in 2014, the average drive-thru wait time was over three minutes (the longest it has ever been in about 15 years)." Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. I know it's a serious worry, but seems like one of those good problems to have.
The problem is that if those customers continue on their downward trajectory, it's going to hit McDonalds too ...