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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."
Wouldn't want to mention this:
I'm scheduled for a short interview on CNN Headline News Thusday, July 8, at approximately 7:45 PM EDT.
Gotta love that Headline News. Ever since the merger they avoid any type of real news like the plague. And the average age of the news presenters is, what, 13?
Casual Games/Downloads
I think they just put that to appeal to our Slashdot nerdiness :).
He's just visiting a lot of points in an ever-expanding graph without much regard for the optimal route, so yeah, it's not the TSP.
how many Starbucks he has seen across the street from another Starbucks
While this is quite funny on the surface there is sound business reasoning behind it. Most traffic intersections are laid out in such a way that a shop on one corner is a major pain to get to from driving along the opposite side of the street. And then getting back the way you were headed requires a major detour. So in a high density area with a lot of traffic it is perfectly worthwhile to open two shops, each on opposite corners to catch customers headed in both directions. Keep in mind when opening your own shop, whether a franchise of a major chain or a private brand.
That was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, made immortal by an accident involving an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and two elastic stripes. Arthur Dent? Arthur Phillip Dent? You're a jerk... A complete asshole.
Why is anything anything?