If you have this kind of scale, you can do crazy things. You have enough data to AB test every single decision, not necessarily even via customer surveillance, you can just have half of the restaurants do A and the other half do B for a month, and then compare results. You can optimize the hell out of everything. You can do focus group testing to discover what customers really want. You can hire the world's foremost expert in chair design to design chairs which fulfill your business goals.
If you're a mom-and-pop, you go off on vibes and on "Karen Smith posted an angry review on Google Maps and she mentioned that the coffee tasted bad, so let's change the coffee."
Apps like Uber Eats change this dynamic a bit, as they can use the power of 0-marginal-cost software to write some of these optimizations once, and then deliver them to all their customers, no matter how small, sometimes without those customers' explicit knowledge.
Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.
The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.
They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.
Customers in store A might have wildly different preferences to customers in store B. Starbucks can't account for that - small stores can.
I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.
Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
I’m picturing a room of tasters going “bitter, acrid, off-putting… approved”