Death by 1000 Optimizations

Remember what coffee shops used to feel like? 

Soft lighting. The smell of roasted beans and steamed milk filling the shop, a scent almost as comforting as the air right before it rains. Books everywhere. You reading your science fiction novel while, across the room, a gray-haired woman is consumed by a well-worn whodunit. A man in a turtleneck scribbles terrible poetry into a notebook with terrifying confidence. All of you lost in your own respective worlds, suspended in the particular bliss that only a good story and a warm cuppa can provide.

You overhear a table of artists debating impressionist paintings. Somebody else stares out at the sidewalk for forty straight minutes doing absolutely nothing except thinking, a once-common human activity now treated with the suspicion usually reserved for tax fraud. The soundtrack to all of this is soft 1950s jazz drifting through worn speakers, with the hiss of the espresso machine complementing the percussion like a steam-powered snare drum.

How lovely was that? 

Fast-forward a couple of decades later, and now instead of books and 1950s jazz, imagine you walk into a Starbucks and see nothing but robot arms whirring around behind the counter, making pumpkin spice lattes 17.3% faster than the fastest human barista can. 

Not quite the same, eh?

But this was where Starbucks was going, until it made a dramatic U-turn under CEO Brian Niccol in late 2024. He calls this pivot “Back to Starbucks.”

The company is refurbishing locations with more warm, wooden surfaces, art, plants, and plenty of chairs, as well as coaching baristas on how to greet customers, get to know regulars, and express warmth and kindness on a daily basis. Not exactly the same as your old local independent, granted, but hey, not bad for a chain.

Before this return to its human-centric roots, Starbucks was knees-deep in the very important business of optimization.

Making everything faster, cheaper, sleeker. More efficiencies, fewer frills.

But hold on… Wasn’t the Starbucks brand built on warmth? Community? A traditional cafe-culture? The original vision was to create a “third place” between home and work, a place to unwind, connect, and feel at home without being home. 

As our friend, Rory Sutherland, says, “Everything you optimize, dies.”  

In the pursuit of productivity, the company lost touch with all of that, and it lost the kind of things that don’t show up on a balance sheet but make all the difference in the real world. The company is now in the process of bringing these ‘intangibles’ back and, no shock here, it has experienced some of the first positive performance news it had in a while. 

It’s tempting to ruthlessly cut anything that seems even remotely inefficient, anything that might slow us down.

But before we do, it’s worth asking: What if one of those inefficiencies is actually our biggest advantage?

What if the frills are the whole point?