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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."
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
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.
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.