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> But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with

> But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with 4 super markets in 1min walking distance from each other... I recall in Frankfurt Ost there was a Nahkauf (Rewe Group) not 300m away from an actual Rewe, which considering they're the same company I consider kind of silly. After some time they decided to close the Nahkauf, and now the location is empty. Or in train stations where there are 2 or 3 different Starbucks selling coffee. Maybe they do this so they can capture the rush hour traffic, and the rest of the day they have reduced staff? Never made sense to me to have them so close together.

vertex-four 9y ago
> Never made sense to me to have them so close together. If there's multiple entrances/exits to the station, you want a Starbucks to be every direction a person might choose to go, so they don't have to go out of their way to go to a Starbucks - the whole point of Starbucks is that it's more convenient to hop into one than to find a better coffee place.
- k__ 9y ago
  But what about 2 super markets from the same chain 100m apart? I mean, I can understand that the city wants a few competitors in the street, but the same store?
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Usually that one's to do with supermarkets merging or buying out other shops, IME. Or brand loyalty where the shops have different brands.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Starbucks found that throughput is sublinear with respect to store size. If you get bigger than a couple cash registers and an espresso machine, the physical workflow, customer queueing, etc eat up the gains from making the space bigger. So, if there's a location that can sell enough coffee to justify opening two small cafes, they open up two small cafes. They never open larger cafes that can serve twice as many people, because that costs more than twice as much for the same throughput.

vertex-four 9y ago

> Never made sense to me to have them so close together. If there's multiple entrances/exits to the station, you want a Starbucks to be every direction a person might choose to go, so they don't have to go out of their way to go to a Starbucks - the whole point of Starbucks is that it's more convenient to hop into one than to find a better coffee place.

k__ 9y ago
But what about 2 super markets from the same chain 100m apart? I mean, I can understand that the city wants a few competitors in the street, but the same store?
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Usually that one's to do with supermarkets merging or buying out other shops, IME. Or brand loyalty where the shops have different brands.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

Starbucks found that throughput is sublinear with respect to store size. If you get bigger than a couple cash registers and an espresso machine, the physical workflow, customer queueing, etc eat up the gains from making the space bigger. So, if there's a location that can sell enough coffee to justify opening two small cafes, they open up two small cafes. They never open larger cafes that can serve twice as many people, because that costs more than twice as much for the same throughput.