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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a good thing overall. I remember the furor when McDonalds opened on the Champs Elysee. Let's be honest, identical globalist fast food plastic frontages ruin the uniqueness of places. Airports are the ultimate example, you can fly 1000's of mile and get off a plane to an airport that is virtually identical to the one you left. This is culturally banal and slowly visually homogenizing the world. The result is insane amounts of tourists heading to the few unique places left in search of differentiation

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For all of Starbuck’s insistence that their franchises maintain a standard of service, I first encountered Starbucks in Seattle and didn’t completely understand the “charbucks” epithet until I bought a mocha in the terminal at DFW during a layover. How you burn coffee bad enough that you can taste it over chocolate I’ll never know.

Coffee is a lot like wine, in that the flavor varies a ton from farm to farm and batch to batch even based on small changes in the terroir, climate, or just randomness.

The central challenge to running any sort of mass food chain is to keep your product as consistent as possible. People expect the Starbucks drink they order when they get off the plane in Miami to taste exactly the same as they one they order back home in Boise.

In coffee, the darker the roast the more the individual characteristics of the beans are replaced by the flavors of the roast itself. Starbucks, and most mass coffee chains, char their roasts because it's a way to homogenize away the variance in terroir that comes from beans sourced across a wide range of farms and batches.

As an Italian, the Starbucks "espresso" I had in the UK once was by far the worst I ever tried for the price. And yes, I tried lots of espressos abroad, from cheap supermarket ones, to fast food chain ones, to essentially any popular higher end café chain.

There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-ma... [PDF, 1MB] The issue is that there's effectively no "good" level of tourism (unless you sell things to tourists I suppose).

Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.

Paris has more tourists than college towns have students.

I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.

Without the tourist euro, they’d just get the rest of France to pay for it.

But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism.

Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.

How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.

I'm not sure how much more offensive McDonald's frontage is than, just for example, Sephora. Both fronts look somewhat plain and are built into existing (and impressive) facades.

Of course, your criticism ignores that culture is more than restaurants and much more than consumerism. No matter what stores are open along the Champs-Elysees, that it connects the Arc de Triomphe and Tuileries Garden is worth more culturally than what store fronts exist along the way. That is certainly the unique bit, and probably what draws tourists.

Well, the Sephora was a draw for my sister :)

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