McCafé: a chink in the QSR armor?

Oh yes, McD is pulling out all the stops for McCafé. (Pre-launch photo on right from Detroit, I think).

And QSR observers (more accurately, one consultant/columnist at QSR magazine) are seeing an opportunity in this for other players, citing "new product launches" that steer away from the "core" business as opportunities for competition to make a big play and boost their own comps.

That's true. But it doesn't explain why the opportunity is there. Understanding why the opportunity is there suggests that not all deviations from the "core" will fail nor will all deviations produce an opportunity for competition to boost their own same-store year-over-year (comp) sales.

McCafe, by the way, has been around for years. We just have not seen it in the USA. According to my friends in Argentina (from whence all the South American and, I think, a few Caribbean stores are managed and quite independently of the mother ship, in many ways and contrary to popular opinion) the concept of a McCafé as an in-store add-on originated in Latin America. Free-standing McCafé's have been in China for years (and probably elsewhere but I don't care about and rarely travel to continental Europe--I'm a Swede and a Chinese dude, these days, and don't know nuthin about birthin' no McCafe's on the continent).

In South America, McCafe is a small, clean, pastry-filled delight, and at flagship stores, its more nifty than the most upscale pastry place you can imagine. But with better lighting, more upscale design, and more high-rollers with their McBooks (no, MacBooks) hanging about and sipping on decent quality coffee.

Franchisees in the USA don't know how to do this, don't have room, and aren't committed to it, despite how the McD Main Shop might like to beat them over the head with the Big Red Book of Franchisee Good Behavior and Legal Leverage.

Now, I'm only talking about McCafé in Southern California, Dallas, and San Francisco (where there are damn few Mickie Dees to begin with). So maybe I'm wrong. But I'm right about one thing: an innovation is not always a chink in the armour. But in this case, McCafé may be a big bloody hole. If I were managing a bunch of Starbucks, I'd be tickled pink. McDonalds is training a generation of junior high kids to like coffee, and they'll be ready for Starbucks when they get a real summer job next year. But, oops, meanwhile McD is getting some dough from those teens that others aren't getting. So who is winning, now? I wonder.

Maybe somebody should hire an anthropologist to dive into this. (Oh, yes, you know what the trademarks are in this post, so give me a break.) And to hammer the initial point home: the chinks in the QSR armor of the competition only exist when local store execution doesn't deliver the promise, or when the promise doesn't matter to the people who go there. Will new/returning customers who formerly (or putatively) abjure Mickee Dees come back to find an unfamiliar coffee and, perhaps, spills on the floor and staff who are not 100% sold on the new product when they were already feeling odd about going back in there in the first place?

One last thing: anybody see a similarity between McD and MacOS? I sure do. More on that later. Maybe.  [Or maybe not! I'm thinking that McD has once again assured its relevance; but I wonder how much McCafé is really responsible for better McD comps.]

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Pacific Ethnography (PacEth) is a globally focused research boutique with staff in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, and associates in Brazil and India.  We conduct field research, grounded in anthropological theory and method, in food, retail, consumer electronics,  personal care, and public policy: www.paceth.com

The Value of Cribbage: Low Vision and Food Packaging

A couple years ago, The Boeing Company hired us to explore how disabled people experienced airline travel in China, India, Chile, and the USA. (follow the link for video).

The results helped Boeing, and may help airlines (we are talking with them!) but we learned so much about disability that we kept thinking, "How can we leverage that learning for better products for people with disabilities, beyond the air-travel space?" But we were too busy with day-to-day business from our regular clients to work on that question.

Just now, business is slow enough to allow our team to re-visit the issue. Thanks to a cribbage game, I learned just how problematic packaging can be.

I was spending more time with my low-vision friend, Fred, an elderly neighbor with whom I play cribbage when I’m not flitting around doing fieldwork. (I should say, "a quick-witted neighbor who regularly cleans my clock at cribbage, and who I have to ply with a couple glasses of wine just to stay even, let alone beat at this old card game!)

Fred was complaining about food packaging. He couldn’t read the cooking instructions with his expensive CCTV magnifier. Sometimes he couldn’t even find them. That caught my attention because we had been talking, at work, about all the stuff we learned on the Boeing project, and how someone—maybe the someone is our company—should apply some of that to consumer products.

So, at a lunch a few weeks later, my friend Carmen (Carmen the fabulous, by the way) of the Braille Institute sat down with me at lunch (we had met during the Boeing work). I told her about my friend, and asked what she thought about it. Carmen told me the same frustrating story: I think she ended up not cooking at all one night because she couldn't find the cooking instructions on the package!





The package shown here (with a hat-tip to Trader Joe's for their yummy French Toast) has instructions on the spine, and you can't read things on the spine with most CCTV readers--the kind of readers that many low-vision folks have in their homes.

Now, here is a case for universal design if there ever was one. Making packaging better for low-vision consumers makes it better for everyone. New technology like the Kurzweil-NFB reader can help, but to use that tool, you have to know where the text is. And the text likely has to be pretty good contrast (and not printed against a photo or some package-design thing) to work.

But how to get packaged-good manufacturers on board? More regulation would make them bristle (probably) but maybe some collaboration would help them understand that 18,000,000 new 65-year-olds are created every year (or will soon be, according to most demographic experts). Plenty of them—myself, Fred, and Carmen included—will have at least some problems with vision.

Designing answers will take work, collaboration, and shared learning. Lets find out who is up to the task. I'm going to keep playing cribbage with Fred (and, probably, I'll loose more often than I'll win) and I'll bet he will have more stories about how some products just don't work for him, despite the tech he has around the house to make his consumer products usable.

Gansu Micro-Business Meets the Mall: Boiled not Fried

These Gansu guys (who would probably identify as Huizu [回族], Chinese from the West of China who practice Islam) provided us with dinner in a big city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province. I had my hopes up for those yummy wide noodles that are stir-fried with lamb or beef and big chunky vegetables, and maybe a skewer or two of spicy lamb. I kept asking about this dish and that dish, pointing out likely looking delicacies on the menu on the wall.

"Sorry, don't have that."
"How about this one here?"
"Nope, not that either."

These folks were so friendly and the smells from the kitchen were so yummy that I gave up and asked "Okay bring what you have," and Jo (who actually speaks and understands Mandarin, while I only fake it), pointed out to me that they are only allowed to serve boiled foods.

Plenty delicious, but the wall to the right (and out of view here) had such lovely goodies on display that I was a little bit dismayed. Its the same menu that most Huizu restaurants have, anywhere in China. But the offering here was sort of limited. Howcome?

Local government was re-habbing the neighborhood, and won't let this restaurateur have a license for anything but boiled food. No wok, no grilling. Water pollution, we were told; inadequate sewer hook-ups. Next door is a Sportswear mall, brand new, not quite finished. The top floor will have a food court. You can bet that they will have all kinds of food, not just boiled noodles and boiled Jiaoze (佼字）.

Discrimination against minority people is illegal, in China--unconstitutional in fact. But all the world over, discrimination against micro-entrepreneurs seems the order of the day. Too often, the banks and the big developers win, and the small operator makes do. In this case, selling (delicious) boiled noodles and jiaoze, which were more fun to eat, cheaper, and probably fresher than most of the stuff sold in most of the food courts, anyhow.