Posts tagged “starbucks”

ChittahChattah Quickies

Frozen Dead Guy Days, a Festival in Colorado, Stays Put [NYT] – Perhaps Burning Man is now the most famous of a group ritual that evolved to celebrate something other than what it originally intended. Excluding, of course, organized religion. Looking at the irony (or cynicism) that so clearly is at root of this shindig makes me wonder about how extensively meaning can shift over time.

It was probably not, in the end, an idea with huge franchise potential or a killer smartphone app in its future. After all, a gleefully macabre weekend celebration built around a frozen corpse – complete with coffin races, tours of the shed where the body is kept on ice and, of course, lots of beer – just might not be as fun beyond the skewed sensibility of Colorado’s hippie-tinged mountain belt. But now it’s official: Frozen Dead Guy Days are staying put in the small town of Nederland, about an hour northwest of Denver, as are the mortal remains of one Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian man whose strange and unlikely saga in death – and long-term storage – inspired the whole thing. The Nederland Area Chamber of Commerce put the rights to the festival up for sale last June, saying it could no longer manage Frozen Dead Guy Days, which had grown rapidly through 10 years of icy, late-winter mayhem and was attracting upward of 20,000 revelers over the course of a weekend in a community of about 1,500.

Smell-designing Sheffield [Edible Geography] – A long and fascinating interview about smellwalks, smellscapes, and other funny words that are about exploring our sensory experiences in spaces. Brilliant! When is the Pacifica smellwalk happening?

There were a lot of people who said they didn’t like the smell of fish. But Doncaster is famous for its fish market, and when we went into the fish market on the walk, even those people who said that they didn’t like the smell of fish actually enjoyed it when they experienced it within the context of the market. They expected to smell fish there – it’s a fish market, so how else would it smell? – and it enhanced their experience of the market. In a vacuum, people say that they like and don’t like particular smells, but it turns out that they can enjoy all kinds of odours as long as they experience them in the right context. As designers, that’s quite an important point for us to note. It would be easy for us to say that because our surveys have said that people like smell A but they don’t like that smell B, therefore we’re going to design out smell B and introduce smell A everywhere. But people can enjoy a smell that they say they don’t like when it enhances their place experience.

Starbucks Frappuccino Bottles as Firebomber’s Tool [NYT] – Kind of a non-story when you go past the headline, but the notion of unintended uses for products is always fascinating. Sometimes that leads to innovation, sometimes that leads to a brand nightmare, I suppose sometimes it leads to both.

Mason jelly jars, whiskey quarts, wine and beer bottles – all have been among history’s vessels of choice for a homemade gasoline bomb. Now, a less likely vehicle has come forth: the dainty, 9.5-ounce glass container used by Starbucks to house its popular Frappuccino drinks. Investigators believe that in a rash of firebombings Sunday near the Queens-Nassau border, a Frappuccino bottle was the incendiary component of choice in most of the attacks.

ChittahChattah Quickies

Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique [Wired.com] – Are mounting (and recursive) reviews and opinions on every-little-thing blinding us with tidal waves of bias and robbing us of fundamentally human experiences such as the joys of discovery and failure?

Our ever more sophisticated arsenal of stars and thumbs will eventually serve to curtail serendipity, adventure, and idiotic floundering. But more immediate is the simple problem of contamination. When the voices of hundreds of strangers, or even just three shrill ones, enter our heads, a tiny but vital part of ourselves is diminished. Suddenly we’re breached, denied the pleasure of articulating our own judgment on this professor, or that meal, or this city… There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.

Radical Sharing Works: This Guy Lets the World Use His Starbucks Card for Free [Good.com] – Accidental, experimental business model proves effective, adds unexpected value.

On July 7th, Stark loaded $30 onto his card and posted the image for his friends to use. Within hours, the money turned into caffeine and prefab sandwiches. So Stark added another $50 and invited a few more friends to see if they liked paying for things with their phones, creating an informal user experience focus group. But this time, the money didn’t vanish. People started adding money as well as spending it. And since then, it’s become an experiment in anonymous collective sharing. Buying a cup of coffee on the card becomes a special act of participation, and giving back so a stranger can do the same just feels good, and certainly better than the average frappuccino. In that way, the technology Stark created is adding value to the coffee people purchase. “Overall it’s working,” he says. Stark created a little program that would check the value on the card and post it to Twitter, so experimenters could see if there is enough for a cup o’ joe before heading out to Starbucks. More and more people joined. As of about 11 a.m. PST today, Stark said that about $3,664.24 had passed through the card.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] On the Road – Complaints of Poor Attitude in Airport Body Scans [NYTimes.com] – [Why does a change in process and design generate such a dramatic change in behavior?] By far, most readers wrote to complain about screeners who were rude. Helaine Fendelman said she felt as if she were in a cage as a screener “yelled at me about why I wasn’t paying attention to those who had proceeded me” through the machine. Elizabeth Wiley wrote of the “generally bullying air of the experience.” Melissa Hickey said a screener “barked orders at me as if I were a common criminal.” Bob Michelet agreed with my view that being ordered around was a “boot camp-like experience,” as he put it. Mary P. Koss said she didn’t like being “yelled at” after a screener decided her fingers were not forming a triangle as instructed while she held her hands over her head. “When I exited the machine, I was yelled at again to stand in place,” she said.
  • [from steve_portigal] Starbucks "Olive Way" test store aggregates Starbucks concepts [The Associated Press] – [While I applaud Starbucks for focusing on the quality of their core product – the coffee – I'm not sure that their secondary product – the experience- will benefit from closeness to the baristas. They need to makeover the staff brand before customers will seek them out] What succeeds at Olive Way will most likely be spread to other Starbucks stores around the country. With muted, earthy colors, an indoor-outdoor fireplace, cushy chairs, and a menu with wine from the Pacific Northwest's vineyards and beer from local craft brewers, this 2,500-square-foot shop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood will reopen in the fall with espresso machines in the middle. The machines at Olive Way will be part of what executives call a coffee theater. Counters will be narrower — a slim as a foot in some places — to bring customers closer to baristas; the machines will brew one cup at a time to extract deeper flavor from beans. The store will be the chain's only location that sells beer and wine in the U.S
  • [from steve_portigal] Introducing New Core77 Columnist Steve Portigal! [Core77] – [I'll be writing something monthly for our friends at Core77]

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Mass Customization of the Fiat 500 – A number of folks we recently met in Europe mentioned this new (although an updated classic) car as being perfect for their needs. The variation and customizing, while perhaps not unique in today's marketplace (I'm imaging the Mini's variability is similar if not beyond) was still striking: "The 500 is available with four different trim levels: Naked, Pop, Lounge, and Sport. Customers can choose also between 15 interior trims, 9 wheel options, 19 decals, and 12 body colours. There are over 500,000 different personalized combinations of the 500 that can be made by adding all kinds of accessories, decals, interior and exterior colours, and trims."
  • Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas – Allison Arieff writes about "inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson" whose "work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues." I'm reminded of my formative experiences with Al Jaffee features from MAD magazine where he's describe future products or technologies, or explain (fancifully) the workings of some current product (i.e. bars of soap that are made with quick disappearing stuff on the outside and then a small interior core that takes a long long time to dissolve).
  • Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt – Suggested to me by René Vendrig at the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, after my talk on looking at cultural differences based on everyday observations. He tells me "It is about traffic, but the real subject is human psychology and how we deal with that kind of situations."
  • It's Not TV, It's HBO – HBO's standard-creating slogan, giving words to the premium experience of their programming.
  • It's not just coffee, it's Starbucks. – New ad campaign for Starbucks attempts to differentiate on quality, but sounds just a bit familiar.
  • All This ChittahChattah | Flying the sneaky skies – (see link for screen grab)

    While checking in online for a United Airlines flight, you may be offered the opportunity to upgrade to Economy Plus. It’s likely that most people decline upsells in many situations, though. The default would be to click “no thanks” and move on to completing the transaction. But United has done some tricky and manipulative interface design. The bright yellow arrow with bold text placed on the right is almost irresistible. E-commerce sites have trained us to envision a transaction moving from left to right (granted that they’ve landed on that model since it corresponds to how we read and other cultural factors); it’s very easy to click on the arrow and make a purchase you didn’t want. It takes cognitive work to search for the preferred option which is a lowly blue-underlined unbolded text link off to the left.

  • Evil-interface design in airline website design spanked by European Commission – "Another common problem is the use of prechecked boxes offering services like travel insurance; consumers must uncheck the boxes to remove the unwanted charge." I've written before about United's website being slightly more subtle in their evilness, by offering an upgrade during check-in where the highly visible (colored graphic arrow) button in the default location will cost you tons of money; it's more effort to realize, locate, and decline the offer. Why do we live in a world where major brands want to sell us things that we don't want by tricking us? It's unconscionable that any company can claim to respect consumers and then pull crap like this.
  • Cyd Harrell of Bolt | Peters reacts to the ludicrous Dell campaign trying to sell computers to women, in 2009 – "…a woman, with the last Dell I will ever own. It’s my current laptop, and I chose it because I needed a computer powerful enough to run screensharing tools and high-res video; I needed mobile broadband to stay in touch with my clients and employees, and not just my kid (heresy!); I needed my screen to look great when I go to meetings with clients. That is to say, I needed it for work. Dell, let’s make it official: you can bite me and the millions of other women who take themselves and their technology seriously."

    I love the articulate passion here, as well as the insight into what may have happened organizationally/culturally at Dell (ahem, really crappy research) that leads to such a horrendously offensive sales pitch to HALF of their buying population

Local Starbucks exhibits passion for their customers

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Recently I was in the Starbucks in the Lucasfilm Letterman Digital Arts Center and was surprised to see what was written on the chalkboard

Starbucks is the same EVERYWHERE. What makes us different is our customers = YOU. We’ve worked all over the city, all over the state and we can honestly say that you are the BEST customers EVER. PERIOD. We see you everyday. People from LUCAS, PAC UNION, YMCA, B&B, THE PRESIDIO, THE MARINA & so many more…
You make us love our jobs, make us love coming into work – thank you! Thank you for being you.
Lucky us!
Happy Holidays.

I am not a regular at this Starbucks, so I don’t know how genuine this acknowledgment of a special relationship feels. It’s a curious example of transparency, asking customers to care about whether or not the workers like their jobs or not, and it’s a curious example of localized empowerment. Does corporate really want individual stores making statements like “Starbucks is the same everywhere?”

What do you think? Is this believable or giddy holiday spirit from someone who used to work on the yearbook team in high school? Should Starbucks be encouraging or discouraging this sort of expression in their stores?

Florida Faux, part 2

During a recent trip to Florida I took some time to check out the Disney-founded community of Celebration.
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The experience was much more subtle that I had expected; perhaps the true nature emerges more through residency than driving through. Overall, it felt a lot like The Truman Show – a set that made everything a bit too perfect and while one can appreciate just how nice everything is, it lacks a certain organic naturalness.

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The town theater is achingly new, yet completely retro. There’s no funk here.

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The downtown area is beautiful, branding is kept to a minimum.

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Starbucks, the Americanized faux-Italian experience (so faux and so Americanized that you can enjoy it without knowing where it comes from) seems to fit right in (but then Starbucks is the ultimate brand for fitting in everywhere and anywhere).

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These electric vehicles were ubiquitous, some turned into rolling advertising vehicles (as has happened with the PT Cruiser, the New Beetle, the Mini, and the Smart Car). I imagine the retirement communities in Florida have a wider general adoption of those vehicles and that’s part of the reason they are seen in Celebration.

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Chick-Fil-A branding at a church event.

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And about 2 miles down the road, familiar sprawl returns, highlighting the contrast. I think that’s the tallest Starbucks sign I’ve ever seen.

Previously: Florida Faux, part 1

Also: Orlando pictures; Miami pictures.

Wild and Free

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Me on bass, Firefly Club, Osaka, Japan, 2001

I had the TV on in the background the other night while I was doing some work around the house–I’ll admit it to you–I was watching E Hollywood True Stories, “Joe Francis Gone Wild.” (Francis is the guy who created Girls Gone Wild (NSFW))

Anyway…about halfway through the show, I heard a really familiar sound fading up in the background. I turned up the volume on the show, and, sure enough, it was a piece of a song from a CD I recorded a few years ago.

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ghost7, New Directions in Static, 2004

As the wow feeling of hearing something I had made broadcast this widely subsided, I started thinking about other aspects of the situation: shouldn’t someone have contacted me, shouldn’t I be getting paid for this?

And here’s where the irony, or at least the thought-provoking conundrum, begins.

I know how hard it is to earn a living playing music (or even just to cover your expenses). Yet I have, ahem, “friends,” who download all kinds of “free” musical content. And when I lived in Japan, I had other, ahem, “friends,” who rented lots of CDs from Tsutaya (the Japanese Blockbuster Video) and copied them onto MiniDisc to build their music collections, thus depriving the artists of their cut of a CD sale. (For a great breakdown of the traditional music industry business model, and a startling look at the reality of making a living as a musician, check out Moses Avalon’s website and book, Confessions of a Record Producer).

My initial self-righteousness about getting paid for the use of my music highlighted a clear differentiation I’ve been making between creative “product” that comes out of the “entertainment industry” and what’s made by people like me, whose primary livelihood is something other than their music, art, etc.

Now that any content placed in the public arena is almost instantaneously redistributable, whither goes the business model/s for creative production? Are songs-as-products becoming obsolete, to be replaced by songs-as-loss-leaders, a la the Starbucks/iTunes “song-of-the-week” card?

How, in this freewheeling new world, will it continue to be possible to shift enough units to pay for the production of something like a U2 album or a feature-length film?

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CD Cover, George Lynch (ex-Dokken), 2000

New analysis covered over at O’Reilly on Radiohead’s 2007 “pay-what-you-like” experiment for selling their album, In Rainbows, would seem to support the loss leader model, with the attention generated by the online trading of the album seemingly as valuable as any actual money earned through paid downloading.

I’d add as well that firing up the tour bus remains an essential part of the prospect. Aside from tribute bands, no one’s found a way yet to pirate the live performance. (Although perhaps the scenario in Kiss’ 1978 movie, where the band is attacked by a lookalike robot band, suggests one possible model.)

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VHS box, Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park, 1978

But back to more grounded futuristic pondering. Is Karl Marx’ dream of making means of production accessible to ordinary people coming to fruition via peer-to-peer content sharing and the free flow of certain types of “raw materials?”

As the “redistributability” of content facilitated by the internet crossbreeds with technology and approaches like just-in-time production, 3D printing, and mass customization, will other types of product production also be wrested from commercial producers?

And will someone from E True Hollywood Stories please contact me about that royalty check?

Cookie Monsters

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I was taken aback when reading this NYT piece on Starbucks loyalty card

Jeffrey D. Lipp, president and chief executive of Chockstone. His company helps customers, including some Starbucks competitors, build and run their own loyalty programs.

What he has found is that it doesn’t take a lot to get diners, for example, to do what restaurants want. One Chockstone gambit involves using the customer’s receipt to make an offer. Return within 10 days, perhaps, and you can get a free dessert, the slip says.

“It’s amazing this stuff works so well,” Mr. Lipp said. “What we’ve found is that people can be bought for a cookie.”

Pardon? You’re an expert in loyalty, but you refer to people being bought? It’s such a Winston Smith moment when the word loyalty – in the context of companies inducing you to return – has no connection with the actual meaning of the word “A feeling or attitude of devoted attachment and affection.” I guess brand and loyalty are completely divorced in the modern corporation.

Note: the picture above comes from our local Safeway store where I have developed an almost Pavlovian association with their free cookie box, which has sat behind the bakery counter to be reached into by slightly sneaky customers. Avoiding sweets most of the time has really pumped up the anticipation I feel when I head to Safeway to pick up groceries or visit the ATM.

So I was stunned to see the sign and realize the free ride was over. If they’ve got me making such a powerful emotional/gustatory association with visiting their store, isn’t that worth a few boxes of cookies per day?

And so, am I being bought for a cookie? I don’t know, really. But the timing of the outrageous quote in the article and the outrageous sign at Safeway suggest some dystopian cookie Happening may be upon us. I’ll keep you all posted.

Postcards from the road: PHX to PDX

It’s been a busy-yet-fun few days on the road, from giving a plenary presentation and workshop at ASU’s Design Research Symposium (more to come, whenever I get my pictures – Hi, Greg!), to meetings, dinner with colleagues, and helping a client synthesize fieldwork data from China and Russia into product concepts. Here are some images I captured along the way:

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Font problems @ Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

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No carry-on tires, Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

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Well, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Pay Here, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Fear God, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Disengaged Citrus, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Life imitates The Simpsons, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Busy license plate, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Crepes To Go, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Font Era #1, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Font Era #2, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Dog Paintings, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Sign upon sign, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Lift party, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Ins and Outage

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Starfucks sticker, Taipei, December 2007

Service outages seem to be common news stories lately. Sure, it’s news when many people in Florida lose power, but also when Pakistan causes a 2-hour YouTube blackout, BlackBerry service goes down, or Hotmail is unavailable.

There’s a sense that we are relying on far too many fragile systems and that as complexity increases, these stories will become even more commonplace (and perhaps even less newsworthy). But being forced to do without something seems to be a tactic companies enjoy using to extract a sense of the value of their service. The Whopper Freakout ad campaign is the most prominent example, but other companies such as Yahoo and Dunkin’ Donuts have conducted (consensual) user research experiments where people go without something and report back on the sense of loss.

But Starbucks pulled off the genius move, closing for a few hours to retrain staff, and making front-page news not for their failure (see: Florida, Blackberry, YouTube, Hotmail above) but for their retraining efforts towards a clarified service promise

Starbucks is welcoming customers back Wednesday with a new promise posted in stores: “Your drink should be perfect, every time. If not, let us know and we’ll make it right.”

This won’t address all of the challenges Starbucks is facing, but it’s a pretty brilliant P.R. success, hitting the denial-of-services hot button and emphasizing the valid, powerful reason behind the outage.

Free as in coffee

Now Bay Area Starbucks shops offer free iTunes access


The new service lets customers shop for music wirelessly through iTunes at Starbucks for free.


The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store operates on the new iPod Touch, iPhone and Wi-Fi-enabled PCs and Macs using one of the latest versions of iTunes. Users are automatically connected to the coffee shop’s wireless Internet network and can see – and purchase – the song that’s currently playing in the store. Each coffee shop is configured individually so that the song piped through the store’s speakers is the same song that appears on the front page of the user’s iTunes.

The free wireless Internet access also only applies to the iTunes Store. Consumers still need to pay to access any other parts of the Web through Starbucks’ partnership with T-Mobile.

This is just terrible writing. Access to the iTunes store is free? How is that newsworthy? There’s news to be had here, but spinning up the free angle is just ludicrous. Did the journalist just swallow the press release and not really think about what new service was? Need they also point out that Starbucks provides free parking, restrooms, and now oxygen?

Clever or deceptive?

John Winsor describes a Starbucks promotion

… when he saw a guy starting to drive off with a Starbucks’ coffee cup on top of his car. [He] whistled at the guy who promptly thanked him and got out of the car to hand him a coupon to Starbucks.

No doubt this is effective; it made an impression on the warn-er, it made an impression on John, and the story is being spread.

But it’s deceptive. John suggests (if I read him properly) that this promotion and indeed Starbucks are great. I don’t know how I would react, but hearing the story makes me angry and resentful. The work of fending off scams – any situation where someone wants something from you that will have to give up if you aren’t careful – is mighty. I can’t trust the person who chats me up in a bar (not that this happens to me personally, of course) in case they are promoting booze or mobile phones. I can’t trust the phone calls or emails I get. And now I can’t trust the person who needs a little Good Samaritan assistance. If I help someone get their bag under their seat on the plane ride home tonight, will they offer me a flyer about Samsonite? Gah, I hope note.

Our culture mostly expects a clear delineation between content and promotion (with many many many exceptions); the people I’m talking to this week about how they learn what foods go with what wines are a great example: if Trader Joe’s puts up an end-cap with a chalkboard that describes the wine on display, that’s okay. Sure, Trader Joe’s was paid by the wine maker to do this, but it’s preferable than having this information on the bottle. There’s a comfort and credibility in context; even if we understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Breaking through that, as Starbucks is trying to do is notable, but personally uncomfortable.

Update: this has been going on for at least a year

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