8 ms·

What is Starbucks' incentive for making wifi faster? Do they really want to encourage the people who sit there all day on laptops? Will the Google wifi require

• corin_ 13y ago
  > Do they really want to encourage the people who sit there all day on laptops? Presumably they do. Sure there are arguments against it, but on the pro side: if people are going to spend a day on their laptop, do you want them buying your drinks every X minutes/hours, or do you want them elsewhere?
  • x3c 13y ago
    Stronger argument against this is they'll lose customers due to lack of seating space.
    • willis77 13y ago
      Why is that argument stronger? You think Starbucks hasn't run the numbers/experiments to test whether a warm body on a laptop is better than the same body ducking in and out? I would bet money they have done a frightening amount of analysis on this question. Also, to your specific point - when people choose restaurants they often go where there's a crowd (the food must be good here), not to an empty restaurant. The situation is a little different because Starbucks is so pervasive, but don't discount the customer draw of a bustling store full of people.
    • nknighthb 13y ago
      I've spent hours in a few different Starbucks in the south bay before. My observation has been that most people either get their order and leave, or stick around for an hour+. The number of people who sit down just long enough to eat a muffin or something is pretty small.
    • notatoad 13y ago
      i'm guessing there are very few people who go to starbucks, see the seating area is full, and leave. If they're already there, they're going to buy something. If it is busy they might order and then go to a nearby park or something, but once they're at the door they're pretty much a guaranteed sale.
    • dkarl 13y ago
      On the other hand, they'll look busy and popular.
    • deveac 13y ago
      I'm not sure. Over the years just kind of casually observing the placement and layout of the stores, it seems that they are maximized to be easy to access by the morning rush crowds as well as the lunch and after work rushes. Also, a pronounced increase in drive-through locations. I could imagine that the majority of a location's revenue comes from walk-in/out business during peak times, and the tables could stay full with little rotation all day without appreciable impact on revenue, while solidifying the chain as a go-to "third place", especially for the business class. Any former employees here to chime in?
  • ben1040 13y ago
    If you have their combination loyalty/prepaid card and make more than 5 purchases on it a year, you get free refills on brewed coffee during a visit (so long as you bought the first cup with the card). So they actually don't mind if you come in and order the cheapest cup of coffee they have, camp on a table all day, and keep coming back to the counter for free refills. They just care that you do it often, and that you minimize their credit card fees when you do it.
    • unsignedint 13y ago
      They pretty much treat that refills as equal as actual paid refills ($0.50) and they won't even know you are getting free refill until they scan the card, too. Of course, if they know you enough, they'll eventually figure it out by looking at your face. Only store I had a problem was in Nacogdoches, TX -- somehow, they didn't allow refills -- citing some health law disallowing it , so I guess it can vary by store.
      • alexlitov 13y ago
        Since almost all stores are owned by Starbucks (some stores in airports and malls are not corp. stores), shouldn't they have a clear, firm wide policy?
        • unsignedint 13y ago
          For all the store I've visited before, other than indirect operation stores, pretty much have very consistent policies regarding pretty much every aspect of their operations. The one store I was treated differently (which was a direct operation store) was little surprising to me, but might have been something to do with bizarre laws in their local jurisdiction, in which case they wouldn't have much choice. It could have been better if they could accommodate me somehow, though...
• x3c 13y ago
  I'm sure they can/will monetize it once it impacts their bottomline. Like charging on time spent in shop or seat reservation charges.
  • mseebach 13y ago
    Starbucks has had free wifi for years. I think it's safe to assume they've figured out the business model.
• bluedino 13y ago
  "Starbucks? The internet sucks there. Let's just go to..."
  • mseebach 13y ago
    Yup. When I travel, I look for a Starbucks when I need to get online (or want to get a coffee and space out on Facebook for a little while). That can't be an altogether bad thing to have people associate with your brand.
• VLM 13y ago
  "My phone is always auto-connecting to attwifi but it ends up paralyzing my phone because nothing works until I go to the browser and agree to their terms." "Say hello to my little friend", which neatly encapsulates how I feel about stupid web login screens on wifi and exactly how I feel each time this app bypasses them for me: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.syslynx.wifiwebloginapp&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.syslynx.... aka "Wifi web login". Can be a bit touchy with some but I've not found one yet that it doesn't eventually work on. Once configured, it just transparently sits in the background, at work, or restaurants, or the library, or pretty much anywhere. I would imagine there exists an iDevice work-alike.
  • mikeash 13y ago
    Unfortunately for us iDevice users, invisible background tasks like that are a no-go. Apple simply won't let you ship an app that sits around and invisibly logs you in like that. Fortunately, iOS itself is smart enough to notice when your network has a login page like that, and will display that page on-screen automatically so you can click through it. Not as smooth as that Android app (which I'm now jealous of), but at least things don't invisibly fail until you figure out what's going on.
    • gonzo 13y ago
      Fortunately, for everyone (Android and iDevice), 802.11u, aka "Hotspot 2.0" neatly solves the problem by doing away with c(r)aptive portals. 802.11u is supported today on some Android phones, and has been (yes,publicly) announced for iOS 7.
      • mikeash 13y ago
        Good to hear. Our long nightmare will finally end someday.
        • gonzo 13y ago
          Wow... you're the Friday Q&A Mike Ask. Aloha!
• dkrich 13y ago
  Starbucks derives much (if not most) of their success from product positioning. It's no secret their coffee is just meh in comparison to any other coffee shop. People frequent Starbucks because they love the brand. A lot of things comprise a brand. The logo, the music, the smell, the brown tiled floor, the atmosphere, and yes, the wifi they offer. If Starbucks partners with Google it isn't really a play to make the free-loaders more comfortable from an operations standpoint, it is about improving their brand image. Once you know they have faster wifi, it will be one more aspect of the brand that you are drawn to, even if it isn't to use the wifi. It may sound absurd, but I believe this is more of a marketing play than actually improving the customer experience.
  • suprfsat 13y ago
    > I believe this is more of a marketing play than actually improving the customer experience. Isn't it fantastic when the two are aligned?
  • arjunnarayan 13y ago
    Starbucks coffee is actually pretty darn good. Sure, if you live in SF, Seattle, Portland, or New York City, you have access to niche coffee shops that can really do better. But objectively speaking, Starbucks coffee is really about 90% as good. And for the rest of the country it _really_ raised the quality of coffee. 20 years ago you got bitter swill anywhere except the above trailblazing cities. Today you can get a properly pulled espresso with perfectly microfrothed whole milk anywhere in the country, which is a pretty mean feat. In a decade or two we've hit Italian levels of coffee quality.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > But objectively speaking, Starbucks coffee is really about 90% as good. "Objectively speaking" about a matter of taste is always improper.
      • pbreit 13y ago
        But coffee quality is not strictly a matter of taste.
• saturdaysaint 13y ago
  I hope that Google finds a smart workaround for the need to login on a web-browser - it is an annoyance every time I walk by a Starbucks. There are a lot of subtle ways of regulating how long customers stay. In recent years, I've seen Starbucks replace cushy chairs with stools and rigid chairs that most people wouldn't want to spend more than 20 minutes in. I've seen more than a few restaurants block off wall sockets. And music can be effective at dissuading loiterers without them being too aware of it - even innocuous coffeehouse stuff can be fatiguing after so long.
• rwhitman 13y ago
  Well on the flip side they've been removing outlets and quietly replacing workspace-ready tables with shorter cafe tables that are hard to work for a long period of time on. So while the wifi would be "faster" the starbucks itself isn't conducive to a work session that would last longer than an hour or two
• northwest 13y ago
  It might be that it wasn't really Starbucks' initiative and that it's rather Google who wants you to surf on their infrastructure. If you remember their business model: 1. Own as many web properties and infrastructure (fiber, etc.) as possible 2. With that, get all the data you can on the user 3. This allows you to build the most precise profiles on users 4. Which in turn leads (besides the benefits for the NSA) to an optimal targeting of their ads (their main cash cow) 5. This leads to the highest margins/cash flow
  • tomkarlo 13y ago
    (1) conflates services and infrastructure, which is sloppy / oversimplified. Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. The infrastructure is primarily there to ensure that folks use the net more overall (and by extension, its services.) That's not necessarily a bad thing: in return for a service you want to use, you're being shown ads targeted at you. To ensure you consume those services, they're made easy to access.
    • mikeash 13y ago
      I wouldn't be too surprised if Google analyzed their traffic and discovered that a lot of people were getting frustrated while logged into Google properties due to slow, crappy connections in Starbuckses, and decided to solve that problem once and for all. Starbucks is, from Google's perspective, a major ISP with somewhat poor service that's very concentrated geographically. That last part means it's very cheap to just swoop in and spend the money to solve the problem definitively. I have no idea if this is actually the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google has decided that they're losing $BIGNUM from bad connections at Starbucks, and that it'll only cost $BIGNUM/2 to solve it with brute force.
    • northwest 13y ago
      > Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. That may be the case mainly in the past. But with technology evolving, I do think it's tempting to go further and extract valuable data from network traffic as well, which in turn can be used to create an even more precise picture of the user.
• wilfra 13y ago
  My experience is probably not typical (I move around a lot and rarely go to the same Starbucks more than a few times) but I'm only about 70% sure that any given Starbucks will have a connection at all. So I only go in if it's really convenient or I have no other options. That's to say nothing of the speed or reliability - both of which are typically mediocre to terrible. If I knew with certainty that every Starbucks had a fast and reliable connection, I'd probably patronize them 50-100% more than I currently do. Hell, I'd be on my way out of this hotel in search of a Starbucks right now if I knew that!
• mattmcknight 13y ago
  If it's running faster, won't people be able to finish whatever it is they want to do faster?