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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."
Before Slashdot = 60,293 visitors since December 2003.
After Slashdot today = 90,000+ (estimated)? Any takers?
Visit every McDonalds? Install every Linux distribution? So many possibilities.
...then we can follow his lead a la ant algorithms.
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I was under the impression that the traveling salesman problem had to do with finding the most efficient (i.e. shortest) route to traverse a *finite* amount of points...how is this the same?
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
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Here in Portland, we firebomb new Starbucks facilities. Fuck you and your corporate coffee. Quit Walmarting the good old coffee shops out of existence.
They've just opened another one across the street from the tiny espresso shack I love to frequent in the mornings. If she ends up going under because of it, I think I might get in the mood for a little firebombing myself...
is actually somewhat interesting. The original logo is (in my opinion) better than the one they use for the rest of the country. It's basically a naked mermaid. Now all you see in their logo is her face. The original logo is also brown, not green. I visited Seattle a few months, and personally I think they should have stuck with the old stuff (then again, it kinda makes them look like UPS).
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Also, the name he goes by is simply "Winter". The only reason he has the "John Smith" in his name is because too many things (like the DMV) break when presented with a single name.
He is also a fairly good tournament Scrabble player. Because the National Scrabble Association's database can't handle single names either, he's registered as "Winter ZXQKJ".
Did anyone read what his hit counter said when the article was first posted?
/. effect in RealTime!
I saw it at 64105 at 11:21 CST.
I hit reload and it's up over 65K now.
Watching the
do() || do_not();
Well, he has had 7 years
2555 days
Thats an average of 1.5655577299412915851272015655577 starbucks per day.
Opening 10 per week, and he is hitting 10.958904109589041095890410958899 per week.
They have 8000 stores now.
I calculate about 13 more years, and he should be able to enter maintenance.
Therefore, he is ahead of the curve.
There was an interview on NPR uite some time ago with someone from starbucks, and the interviewer asked him about starbucks so close to each other. He had a story about it that goes something like this:
It was actually accidental. When the new store opened (across the street from the old store), the old store's sales increased 20%, and the new store nearly matched it. So we did some reasearch and found that if we can put locations within 2-3 miles of eachother, the revenue of both stores will be higher.
The story was on maybe a year or more ago, so obviously I'm strongly paraphrasing.
At any rate, remember: being able to spit on one starbucks from another starbucks isn't really their idea. They just went with observed phenomina.
I spent a while surfing his site which suprisingly wasn't /.'d into oblivion. After about 5 minutes I was convinced the guy is brilliant.
This is an amazing and important piece of work. The sheer volume of pictures, the sheer enormity of this effort is so impressive that I think this has to go down as one of those pieces of art/documentary/social commentary/lark that if it's preserved, people will look back on in 50 or 100 years (maybe less , maybe more) and just find terribly facinating.
First of all, just the pictures of all the architecture of locations in all 50 states alone is amazing. It's absolutely insane once you realize how much revenue and commerce Starbucks generates (all politics and love and hate of the company aside, it's just amazing when you see them all in one web site). Thes buildings had to be constructure, outfitted, opened, etc. The record of all these buildings, all these locations is like a mini snapshot of the whole U.S. from coast to coast and then world wide as well. It's an amazing piece of compare and contrast, and an amazing document.
Coming at it from the other side, I think the guy is a great artist also. This definitely qualifies as art in my mind, bordering on journalism, bordering on madness which is where a lot of great art comes from. Think of how many stories each state/city/area of a city/district tell about this experience, picture him going from store to store documenting this, etc. It's an endless story, he could write a book about it. Others have mentioned on here how comedians like Lewis Black have also seized on the sheer crazyness of the Starbucks phenomenon. Artists bring these issues into focus for people and the number of people critizing him here make me feel even stronger about the fact that he's doing something cool.
Winter is alright in my book. I don't think he's ruining the environment by travelling , I don't think he's a nut and don't think it's a waste of time. It's actually quite an important piece of work. Congratulations man.
I'm the original AC poster (can't you tell) and while yes, it was unfair of me to compare CNN Headline News with Fox, I still stand by my assertion that Fox does not give news stories, it comments on news stories. The only time Fox actually gives news is at the top and bottom of the hour for about 2 minutes (usually much less) or the "Around the world in 60 seconds" segment (forget the guys name).
I make it a point to watch Fox so that when I make a comment I am speaking from personal experience, not some regurgitated story I read somewhere.
Tune in any time to Fox when it does not have one of their commentary shows on and tell me how often they are reporting news stories. Essentially none. Now compare that to CNN (regular) and Headline News. Headline News, while its quality may have declined, still gives news stories. CNN is the same. From time to time they may have an 'expert' on a subject give their opinion on a story but when that segment is over the news continues.
As far as newscasters going off script and giving their perspective, who cares! That's not their job. Their job is to read the paper/teleprompter in front of them.
That reminds me of the scene in Broadcast News where William Hurts character was covering a breaking news story about the pilot of an F-14 who was shot down near Libya. At the end of story he makes the comment, "I think we'll be all right."
The head of the station had been in the control room watching this and when he heard this remarked, "Who the hell cares what you think!"
He sounds like he'd get on very well with Dave Gorman, who, after a drunken bet, made it his goal to find 52 other people named Dave Gorman, and also got a bit obsessed with Googlewhacking.
Also Danny Wallace who after having bet Dave Gorman to find 52 Dave Gorman's got it into his head that he needed 1000 people to join him , without actually knowing what they were joining (there are now over 8000 joinees).
And then of course there is the inimitable Tony Hawks (not Tony Hawk) who needed to win a bet that he could hitch-hike around the entire coast of Ireland with a refridgerator.
All of their books are highly recommended (especially Join Me, which is the funniest book I've ever read.
Especially when you consider that all Starcruds "coffee" is over-roasted, burnt and bitter. The one thing they've ever done right is the snow job they've done in persuading people that badly-made coffee is the best thing they've ever tasted. If the average Starbucks customer ever tasted Gevalia, they'd never go back again, but Starbucks is trading on their ignorance. I guess it just goes to show how easy it is to fool people and how little most people know about how coffee's supposed to taste. Of course, most of those people probably still think percolators make good coffee.
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I was more reminded of the shoe stores from the radio scripts.
Breakfast served all day!
Uhhuh... Gevalia?
;)
It landed here in Finland few years back. The TV commercial catch-phrase was something like: "Coffee you could offer to your guests" -- Often with a storyline where someone crashed into your home in an unexpected situation.
Which was much joked as meaning "You wouldn't offer your GOOD coffee to uninvited guests now would you? So keep a pack of this horrible shit in the cupboard just incase."
And personally. I hate it...
These are my choises of coffee:
Presidentti and Juhlamokka (Sorry, I couldn't fina a link for the latter)
And yes, I feel qualified to comment on quality coffee
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I'm sorry you didn't like Gevalia, but not everybody's going to like the same thing. I'm sure you're qualified, and I see that you have interesting tastes. I note that you don't list Starbucks as a favorite, and wonder what you think of it. BTW, do you know why Scandinavians are such big coffee drinkers? I've often wondered but never knew the right person to ask. I doubt that the weather's the only reason, as Russians, among others with hard winters don't drink that much.
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