Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free • Hacker News Board

Re: Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free

#81

Post by camgunz » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:32 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #76

camgunz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, fast food is my chief inconsistency case. Have you had fries at more than 1 franchise? They're always different.

Consistency matters between restaurants, not between franchises. McDonalds fries may vary slightly from one location to the next, but they are more similar to each other than to other restaurants' fries.

Consistency has many different axes though. Maybe when I was 7 or something I was really keen to the difference between Wendy's fries and McDonald's fries, but now I only care if fries are good or not, and no fast food restaurant has consistently good anything because you can't do food at this scale and have consistently good food. The assembly line generates 30 weird chicken nuggets every 1000 and no one's checking. This is what I mean by "it's not consistency": at the scale of these chains the (underpaid, mistreated) workers' eyes glaze over and metrics like "% fecal matter" start popping up

Re: Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free

#82

Post by camgunz » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:41 AM UTC

ranger207 wrote: post #75

camgunz wrote: post #30

It's not clear to me what the benefit of chains is (before anyone says consistency that's definitely not it) to consumers and markets. I guess the idea was supposed to be something like leveraging economies of scale, but most chains are just fronts for broader supply chains with multiple other clients--it's pretty rare that there's a specific like, Applebee's supply chain. But isn't it clear by now that it's all arou…

The answers include * Consistency: you know every store in a chain is going to be within a standard deviation or so of every other * Economies of scale * Developing specific supply chains for their business. Sure there's not a specific Applebee's supply chain company, but there are specific product managers at supply chain companies for Applebee's products, and when you take the set of product managers, warehouse spa…

I really like your 3rd point here because, yeah, I don't think we'd have the efficient supply chains we do now without huge chains to ensure profitability. I think you have to say that's been a huge boon to efficiency.

But I also think it's generally bad and weird. Like how many people know that between the major orange juice brands the only difference is the different perfume they use in the concoction? Supply chains are incentivized to deliver huge loads of essentially crap that breaks constantly so demand stays high, or food that's totally loaded with fat/sugar/salt so you eat way more. Plus like, where does that profit go (not the 99% right)?

Re: Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free

#83

Post by highwaylights » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:43 AM UTC

brylie wrote: post #20

thaumasiotes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "tat"?

Noun (UK) anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition: Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tat

Exactly - In this case by tat I mean things like Harry Potter drinking flasks, Hunger Games calendars, and vaguely book-related trinkets that can be sold for under £5.

(The kind of high-margin items that you didn’t come to the shop for and most people won’t buy anyway.)