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The Traveling Salesman Problem Meets Starbucks
Call Me Black Cloud writes "John 'Winter' Smith, a contract computer programmer, is living the traveling salesman problem. His personal quest is to visit every company-owned Starbucks and he's not doing too badly. After 7 years he's hit over 4,000 locations in the United States and 167 in Britain and Japan. What motivates him? That's one for the professionals to answer, but since Starbucks opens an average of 10 stores per week it doesn't look like Winter will be stopping any time soon. His website offers insight into why he does this ('to be different') and has pictures of the 4000+ Starbucks he's visited."
One of the great unanswered questions.
10 * 52 * 100
in 2104 we'll have over, what, 58-60,000 starbucks?
YES!
Casual Games/Downloads
Among the paramedics at work they are known as Fourbucks, on acount of their prices. ;P
he would have written a computer program to keep track of all the starbucks, and visit them in the chronological order that they were opened, and have that program keep track of all the messy details of any that closed or moved, etc.
(yes, a douglas adams reference to the infinitely prolongued guy who insulted the universe in alphabetical order)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Visiting every starbucks to be different is like visiting every taxidermist's shop because it's the cool thing to do and all the kids are doing it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
an absolute, nailed on "please let me bear your children" hit with the ladies.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
What's really important, though, is how many Starbucks he has seen across the street from another Starbucks.
What motivates him?
Caffeine, obviously.
Presumably his camera has some serious jitter correction built in...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I thought it had something to do with the farmers daughter.
.signature not found
Hmm... If I wanted to be like Len Adelman, I could encode each Starbuck's location into a short oligonucleotide sequence, create matched-pair of DNA oligos each representing a travel-step from starbu_x to starbu_y, create a DNA soup (watch your filthy mind!) of these oligo-pairs, do the appropriate restrictions and selections by weight and publish an article in Science or Nature, have the journalists and flacks mis-represent it as being a DNA computer capable of solving the "Travelling Salesman" problem when every mathematician and theorist knows it to be the Directed Hamiltonian Graph problem, not worry about it, and move on.
Oh, and please insert "profit" and the appropriate "/item" tags around the list above, and let LaTeX number it for me. Thanx.
Corporations make the gasoline you use in your molotov cocktails you corporate whore cocksucking sellouts!
Is this a test sir?
Anything you order is free sir. Don't worry, it's clean sir.
Your sure this isn't a test, sir? You were in here last Tuesday, standing right where you are now. You asked, "how good is security?" It's excellent sir, tight as a drum.
You said if anyone came asking, we'd have to mod him down, even you. This is a powerful gesture, sir.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
I can understand this.
I, myself, have a desire to visit every McDonalds on the face fo the planet.
But first I have to buy a bulldozer, and a cargo plane to carry it between continents...
"Starbucks of Topeka, Kansas? Starbucks #2046 of Topeka, Kansas?
"Err... Yes"
"You're a jerk, Starbucks. A real kneebiter."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Let's see... 4000 stores, multiplied by an average of $8 per cup of coffee, comes to what?
;)
:-P
Hmm, the units don't work out, but I thought I'd offer you my help anyway.
It comes to 32000 dollar stores per cup of coffe.
The thing is, *everyone* seems to complain about them, but the damn shops are always crowded! I think there is some double standard shinanigans going on...
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
"...and if you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks. And directly across the street -- in the exact same building as that Starbucks -- there is... another Starbucks. There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks! And ladies and gentlemen, THAT is the end of the universe."
Gotta love that Headline News. Ever since the merger they avoid any type of real news like the plague.
Oh shit - the plague is back?!?
So he just got out of Seattle?
Is that something like a Tim Horton's?
:)
??!?!