soapbox

The drive-up coffee shack. Maybe they exist places other than the Seattle area, but I haven’t seen them. It’s a pretty simple construction, a small building maybe 4′ by 8′, a sliding window at the right height for a F350 truck, a small door for the barista to get in and out, and not much else. Typically, they’re in the parking lot of a gas station so if nature calls the barista can always close things down and just run into the station’s bathroom. There are fancier ones made of cinderblock or with little indoor areas for customers, but the basic recipe is the same and they are EVERYWHERE!

Due to the small footprint, the location has got to cost very little and a barista makes ~$10/hr so you really don’t need to sell very many lattes an hour to make these things a going concern, maybe only five.

So, why is this dubious?

Well… you get the sense that there’s a marketing arms race going on. You can’t lower prices, how how do you differentiate your hut from the one a quarter of a mile down the road? The answer, like everything in marketing, is sex appeal. I have to assume that when the huts started, one advertised “hottest barista around” and hired some UW student. Then came the bikini coffee huts. It’s a slippery slope though limited only by public decency regulations. Up the street now there are three huts that have “lingerie baristas”. And pasties on MWF. What’s next? Peep baristas?

I’m actually very curious about the whole thing. Who is the target demographic? Is the coffee noticeably better or worse than say, a Starbucks? Does having a hot girl increase sales more than a slightly fancier hut would?

The fact that I’ve been living fairly far north/in places with winter for the last 33 years, I didn’t really consider than you can get sunburn in March. Right? I mean March is a month of rain and jackets.

OMG! My ears and face are no longer lobster red, but my forearms are still nice and crispy. Ouchers.

The family and I were down in San Diego over the weekend for M+K’s wedding and had a great time visiting (although M+K were, needless to say, somewhat tied up with things besides socializing with us… ). Hung out a lot with Nick and Courtney and had good times hanging with good peeps.

Anyway, Michael and Karli, I was going to give you the advice that you should enjoy your wedding weekend since you only get one of them… but you do get to have another one in only a couple of months! Haha.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the fifth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-free, RIAA-safe collection of songs totaling 6 GB, which can all be downloaded for free, thanks to BitTorrent.

The torrents can be found here. It’s not very often that I use BitTorrent to legally download stuff

I’m sitting in the Denver airport and there are entire flocks of little birds flying about. It makes me wonder how they got here?

Is it a random process where birds accidentally fly in through open doors?

Are there simply holes in the airport big enough for them to fly in and out?

Are the birds organized enough to stage daring raids swooping through the air handlers until they get inside?

In a very science fiction way, I hope it’s the last option.

Check this one out: blind kid hits game-winning free throws.