MattMaroon.com

I was reading this hatchet job from Reuters about Starbucks because, well, I’m a glutton for intellectual punishment. It’s about how Starbucks has been experimenting with stores using other branding, trying to go for a more local feel.

This article posits that “Perhaps consumer really do want something more than branded artifice; they want something genuinely local.”  Bullshit.

This is wishful thinking on the part of people with a fetish for local mom-and-pop businesses. They write the same victory speeches on their LiveJournals every time one Wal-Mart moves out of a neighborhood, despite the fact that for every instance of that hundreds more move in.

Starbucks is facing attacks on all sides. They’ve got Peet’s and Caribou growing quickly. They’ve got McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts both heavily promoting their coffee lines these days. They’ve got the fact that they drastically overbuilt in the first place (though I thank them for it, as it inspired what was quite possibly the greatest standup comedy bit of all time) coupled with a double-digit unemployment rate that makes people think twice about that daily $5 cup of joe.

True, they do have local coffee shops improving the quality of their offerings as a direct response to Starbucks. Unlike retail, which is all about using volume to reduce costs while retaining a thin sliver of a profit margin, it’s not nearly so hard for local businesses to compete in an industry with 1,000% markup. The fact that they have to buy their coffee for 20% more than the chains is virtually irrelevant.

But people don’t give a shit about locality or being different, at least not enough people to matter. They all eat at Fridays and Olive Garden and shop at Wal-Mart and Target. Hell, go to any public place and at least 75% of people are wearing pants made of the same fabric and in the same color. Seinfeld once joked that we all ought to wear the same thing, the way aliens always do in sci-fi movies. Well, we haven’t settled on the shirt yet but we’re half way there.

So it’s hard for me to believe that a nation full of people who all own at least 4 pairs of blue jeans really worry about sameness when it comes to buying a latte. That’s just wishful thinking on the part of people resistant to change.

I don’t know where mom-and-pop stores got this recent mystique, but the whole fetish is just the modern equivalent of tilting at windmills. Thankfully it’s relegated largely to blogs and drum circles too, because I do love my Venti Apple Chai Latte.

Dear Time Warner Cable,

If you routinely bill someone with a due date of around the 27^th, and they pay on time every single month for three years, and then you change the billing date to the 16^th, don’t send them to collections if they haven’t paid by the 23^rd. Just call them. Chances are they auto-pay their bill on the 25^th and just didn’t notice the change.

Thanks,

Customer who will be switching to Fiber to the Home the second it is available in my area.

One funny thing about Californians is how pathetically they handle weather. Coming from Ohio, it’s downright humorous what happens here whenever it isn’t 75 and sunny.

If it gets down below 60 during the day, they start whining. If it hits 55, the winter coats and long johns come out. Oddly though, unlike anywhere else I’ve been, it can be 85 here at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and by 9 it’s in the high 40′s. That unusual temperature drop is nice because the locals stay inside and the traffic is less bad. It’s always varying degrees of awful, but as soon as the thermometer hits 60, it gets significantly less so as the Californians scramble for shelter.

And when there’s even the slightest rain all hell breaks loose. If they get three days of Ohio’s average April weather in San Fran you can row your boat to work. Apparently nobody here has ever heard of a drain. For any Californians reading, a drain is kind of like a manhole cover but with holes in it. Google it.

Even a little drizzle here causes rolling blackouts, and a 5 mile per hour wind seems to knock about 1 in 5 trees over, generally into the road, where they sit for weeks. They don’t seem to have anyone tasked with picking them up, and the neighbors sure aren’t going outside. In the Midwest we have such cleanup crews, but even though the weather is far more severe there they’re not really needed because our trees are made of wood. I’m pretty sure California trees are composed of Styrofoam.

I’m starting to hate Facebook. Seriously. For a long time I loved it. It’s like MySpace, but minus the “come see me naked on my webcam” spam (one nice thing about the subprime collapse is at least the mortgage spam has dried up), the two minute page load times, the annoying songs that play when the page finally does load, and the backgrounds that make text illegible. In fact, it was pretty much better in every conceivable way. Until they added apps.

Apps have ruined the whole site. Before it was like, you were hanging out with some friends, and maybe the topic of Facebook came up. And one of their douchey friends was like “what’s your email, I’ll add you.” So you’d give them your email, because what else are you going to do, and they’d friend you, and that was probably the end of it. Then a few weeks later, you’d unfriend them and hope they didn’t notice, or that you just never saw them again.

But now there are Facebook apps. So when your douchey friend of a friend adds you, they then proceed to bite you turning you into a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie, or some other mythical beast that just happens to spread memetically. Then they give you a few fish for your aquarium, a garden with a tomato plant and a mouse, a free gift (some crap like a pool floatie that you wouldn’t even use if it were real) and update their mini-feed to let everyone know that they’re going to the Green Day concert and they’re so excited. And all of their douchey friends do the same, bombarding your mini-feed with crap you don’t care about.

And you can’t just give said douches a fake email, they’ll just think “oh, he probably just forgot which email he uses there, I do that sometimes” and then find you on your mutual friend’s friends list. And you know you have to accept, because what if you see them again (and maybe there are some hot chicks in their profile to look at anyway) but can you maybe get away with only letting them see your limited profile? I mean, you def don’t want anyone you don’t really know who is already trying to bite you into zombieness getting your phone number, but then what if they’re like “dude, why did you limit me?” That could get uncomfortable.

Facebook should have an annoyance filter. Then I can get my mini-feed back to what it should be. All I want to see is when a friend adds another friend (in case it’s a hot chick, obv), when someone sends me something, and maybe a birthday or two.

Also, if Word auto corrects the word “douchey” to the word “douche” one more time, I’m throwing this laptop out the window.

If you work for the TSA, I hate you. I just thought you should know. And because you’re always so condescending to everyone, you should also know that you’re one rung up the socioeconomic status ladder from my dog. In fact, he routinely catches pests like moles that would otherwise be eating valuable crops, so he might actually contribute more to society than you do. As far as I can tell, all you do is make people throw away (and then presumably buy and replace) cigarette lighters. That’s your contribution to humanity, increasing Zippo’s quarterly profits by a fraction of a percent.

I’m sorry I forgot to take my goddamned shoes off, but it’s 7 in the freaking morning and I’m usually going to bed at this hour. Unlike you I don’t have a job pushing a button and pretending to look for guns that makes me wake up at that time. We can’t all be smart enough to check passports, because if we were, who would flip the burgers?

I have to give you points though, if I worked a job that a chimpanzee could probably do after a week of training, I wouldn’t have the balls to look down on every business traveler (who would probably make more in a week than I did in a year) who forgets that bottles of water are verboten. You do, though I’m sure you’d never phrase it that way because anyone who works for the TSA has probably never even heard the word “verboten”. Look it up.

Oh, and by the way, today I put a little travel sized container of lotion in my pocket and walked right through. And I had a bottle of Purell in the other one too. No Ziploc baggie either. Eat it sucker.