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What is something that you completely can not understand why it exists?
From time to to time I notice something and I am like wow there is a market for this.
One big one for me has always been Starbucks. I can not imagine paying their prices for coffee. And I generally want a coffee within the first 15 minutes of waking up so the idea of putting on clothing and going to a coffee store everyday seems both a huge waste of time and money.
So for the most part I can’t understand the volume of business at coffee stores.
While I disdain Starbucks, I frequent local espresso shops and order all kinds of girly drinks. It's tasty, it's fun, it's something I can't entirely recreate at home, it's a fun outing with Mrs. FiveHour or by myself with a laptop to sit for a few hours. I don't think I could go every day, but on the scale of indulgences, I find it perfectly fine.
But I can't understand:
-- Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
-- The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.
-- Cruises. The whole set-up seems wildly unpleasant, particularly if I'm going to have spend my time on a boat cooped up with other people who wanted to go on a cruise.
I 100% understand all the sweet girly drinks. It’s like going to Dairy Queen for a treat. Chilling at a cafe while having a coffee drink with some sort of cake for a few hours is a lot of fun, but I don’t believe it pays the bills for them.
But I assume the bulk of their profits come from caffeine rush to get thru the working day. And that just seems like a huge time sink. Even if you work on the 50th floor of mega corp office building then going to get your coffee at Starbucks on the ground floor is still a 20ish minute adventure versus whatever office pot or espresso machine in the office.
Lifted pickups are the same as 80% of the economy. Status games showing yourself spending money. No different than spending $3k in the club whose real purpose is showing every girl in the club that you have enough money to spend $3k frivolously.
Sometimes you just need an excuse to get out of the office and take a walk, and sadly, in a lot of workplaces "I'm going out to grab a coffee" is more acceptable than "I'm taking a stroll to clear my head." Same thing as having a smoke break, really, but for non-smokers.
Yes. I get all the reasons people are saying. But personally I go to Starbucks or other chain coffee maybe once a year. Usually at the airport or something.
Maybe the logistics are a lot better than I am imagining but my intuition tells me it would take a minimum 20 minutes but probably closer to 30 to get to your chain coffee place, order, and get your product. I think I’ve seen the average office worker spends 3 hours a day goofing off on the internet so maybe it’s not a problem. Or the logistics are much faster than I imagine.
Money is a secondary thought since most offices have a coffee pot for free. But honestly Americans are rich enough and everyone waste money so $5 a day 250 days a year isn’t a huge mental block for me.
My “I don’t Understand” is much more on the financial side in America where rent and wages are high. So you actually need a lot of people with 20-30 spare minutes to get a $5 a coffee a day to support the store. I guess that’s about 1500 daily customer needed to support one Starbucks.
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