Gerald Stone was born in the USA but after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he moved his family to Australia where he had a long distinguished career in journalism. He launched Australia’s 60 Minutes program and then ended up back in the USA for a few years working for Fox. In his terrific 2011 book, Say It With Feeling: Megastars, Media Tsars, Trailblazing TV: Memoirs of a Prime Time Warrior (one of the ways I splurged on myself during Covid was to buy this hardcover), Stone wrote:
“Americans put a lot of time and effort into food. Back in Sydney, if I were holding an urgent production meeting that ran over, I would call for some chicken or ham-and-cheese sandwiches and not expect to hear a murmer of dissent. In New York in a similar situation the entire meeting would grind to a halt as a selection of menus from the nearest fast-food stores was passed around to ponder — one person to order Mexican, another Chinese…”
The more diverse your society, the more friction you’ll have in your transactions. Bill Saporito writes in the New York Times today:
There Are a Bazillion Possible Starbucks Orders — and It’s Killing the Company
You’re already in line at Starbucks — having failed to order by app — when you spot one of them. That dude who is looking down not at a cellphone but at the Post-it note that holds the orders of his office mates. Which is confirming that you are going to be late for that next meeting, because this person plans to order six coffee beverages, each of which involves some combination of tall venti grande double-pump, one to four shots of espresso, half-caf, oat milk, nonfat milk, soy milk, milk milk, whipped cream, syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, no sugar and mocha drizzle, from the pike position with two and a half twists.
Even ordering via app has issues. There’s often a crowd waiting at the bar end because Gen Z, which tends to prefer anything but human interface, has overwhelmed the baristas with the same orders-of-magnitude drinks. Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.
If the degree of difficulty in a typical Starbucks order now seems to be Olympian, so are its troubles.
