Starbucks on the decline

I was reading the paper the other day (well the online version) when I noticed an article about the declining fortunes of Starbucks.

In the US you can sit in a Starbucks branch and look out the windows and see another branch. Seems they have over saturated the market and are now paying the price. and the coffee is crap and over priced.

I was discussing this with a coffee conisour friend and he was telling me they roast the crap out of the beans so that even the 12 year old 'barista' behind the counter can pour a 'good' coffee.

I hate to name drop, but it reminds me of a story Britney Spears sound engineer once told me. In the US he would drink Starbucks coffee, not because it was good, but because it was consistent.

One of the things the article brought up was that places like MacDonalds are now raising their game in the coffee market and people no longer need to go to starbucks and pay a fortune for a decent cup of coffee.

I was in the airport this morning for a little domestic jaunt and noticed the massive queue at Maccas. Most of these people were getting coffees even though there are perfectly good and not to expensive coffee outlets all around them.

Its interesting to see what we consider to be the big fast food joints branching out in to other directions such as the McCafe concept or the Gloria Jeans of the world who basically copied the Starbucks model but customised it to fit with the Australian cafe culture.

I guess if nothing else Startbucks made everyone lift their game and raised the standard of cofffee in these more traditional outlets where it was only ever an add on and was mostly a drip-o-lator that had sat for too long and boiled itself into a bitter mud.

Energy Saving at what cost ??

I am currently in Melbourne for reasons that are far to messy to go in to.
I am in a lovely hotel room in Mornington (more about the room shortly), but it has one of the wierdest setups I have ever seen.

It has one of those 'put your room key in the slot to turn the lights on' things on the wall. Cool I'm fine with that.

But I also discovered that the rocket scientists who put it in wired the Alarm Clock to the same circuit, so when you leave the room the clock goes off, and when you come back you have to reset the time and alarm time on the clock....

There are also some bollard lights in the garden that seem to be on 24/7. So they make up for all the power saved by turning the clocks in the rooms off.

Very Odd.

Fuel Prices

This is one of those post i have been meaning to do for ages, but every time I sit down to do it something else happend that drives the story and expands it a little bit more.

Todays case is that oil has hit $100 per barrel. All those nice oil people thought it was best they should pass this on ASAP to us poor motorists, so fuel went up be 10c today.

When I was originally going to write about the scam of fuel prices it was just after the ACCC has handed down a reeport that said there was no obvious examples of pricing fixing or cartel activity. Its just convient that all major world events that affect the petrol price happen on a Thursday and then calm down on a Sunday. Regular as clock work.

The ironic thing was the week after the fuelk companies hiked it by 10c in the week before christmas for no apparent reason. And it wasn't even a Thursday.

Mmmm. I can see a pattern here and its not pretty. So fill up on a Monday or Tuesday, unless you are me and forget..

Best job in the world

While I was going through the baggage screening at the airport I saw the funniest thing. Some poor Asian chick had been pulled aside for having liquids in her bag.

The customs lady seemed to be enjoying taking the woman's expensive moisturiser and perfume off her. Hmm, Jurlique, 150ml? Can't take it. CK fragrance 200ml? Can't take it. The poor passenger then came out with 'but I have used some of the moisturiser - there is only a little bit in there. 'sorry love, we go by the size written on the bottle'

She also seemed to have two tins of tuna and some kind of herbal cream (label was in Chinese, but it looked like 'roid cream).

I wonder if that is how customs do their Christmas shopping?

Queue ettiquete pt 2

I spent almost an hour in a queue for check in for an international flight today. Now as you know I have a very low threshold for idiots in queues (see this post).

The thing that amused me about today was that after queuing for and hour I was still surrounded by people who didn't have passports or documentation to hand.
What do you think we are queuing for ? The toilets? You need your passport to check in....

Maybe its a Sunday thing when all the people who have never flown before come and queue just for something to do.

Hotel Bathrooms

Showers in cupboards, noisy extractor fans, dodgy plumbing. I really have a thing about hotel bathrooms. I like two things in a bathroom. Multiple light sources, ideally of different colour temperatures (bit of a snob that way), and ideally a window to the outside world. It is very rare to get the second thing. Bathrooms by there very nature tend to be close to the core of the building where all the services are.

I have stayed in hotels with both, indeed I had a great hotel in the UK once where you could lie in the bath and look out the window to the beach below. Might have freaked a few tourist out though…

The multiple light source thing is a redundancy issue as I always seem to get the room where all the light bulbs are about to blow. I also like to be able to see to shave. Is it too much to ask ?? Note to the hotel designers out there. Lights above the sink, and general room lighting please.

If there must be an extractor fan can it not sound like an airliner taking off? Also please don’t make the fan start auto-magically when it detects a certain amount of moisture in the air. That always scares the poo out of me.

Light levels in public spaces – Full On or Full Off

Recently I have been on the road for work and spent a lot of time in hotels and conference centres. This also means a lot of cafes, restaurants and bars. Why does it seem modern interior design either wants you to function in an over lit space or in the dark?

I had a hotel room lit by a single 60w globe on a 3m ceiling. A colleague of mine fell up the stairs at a large big-brand hotel in Perth when she couldn’t see the brown carpet in the badly under-lit stairwell. This was a venue that had recently gone through a massive re-development.

I thought it might just be because I work in the Lighting industry that I notice these things, but a quick round table with some chums after work one day came to the same conclusion.

It also seems the more it costs to eat or stay somewhere the better the lighting is.

Admittedly as places are refitted and upgraded the lighting is getting better, but have a look around the next time you are out and about. I guarantee you will find examples of bad lighting in public spaces.

VCRs on Planes - Why?

You can spent millions of dollars on a Boeing airplane, but they can’t fit a decent VCR? It seems planes worldwide use a tape based system for their playback. This means lines, distorted pictures and general crap quality.

In this day and age of ipods and media servers why is it still so? I can understand not having optical drives, like DVD or CD, as turbulence would course a heap of issues, but surely flash memory has reached a point where it is possible to store content at minimal cost.

Imagine the benefits for the airlines. Pull up to the gate and then using a Wi-Fi connection they simply upload the latest news or media content to the plane.

Maybe it’s a copyright issue and they think if they make the quality crap then the staff won’t steal the tapes. With a solid state solution you could get around this by having no tapes. It would be the ultimate closed loop solution.