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Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit.

Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits.

I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.

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These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions.

However, there's a real smell of something going wrong from them as well. The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Why? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Did they have no way to report it? Did those reports not get evaluated properly? Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

Your last paragraph has a valid point, and the outcome of such a visit can simply be that: There are ideas, but for some reasons, they don't make it to the higher levels. Let's find out why!

That problem is exacerbated in this case by the difference between "retail", "retail corporate" and "corporate". The fact the that anything coming from the frontline employees not only had to work it's way up to retail leadership, but then to essentially an entirely different corporation's leadership makes it nearly impossible for ideas that require action by "corporate" to trickle all the way up.

The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems.

For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.

For a small example:

    S s;
    S *p;

To read a field:

    s.field
    p->field

It turns out that there's no ambiguity in using `.` for both `.` and `->`. Both can be:

    s.field
    p.field

But what's the problem with `->`? It's when you want to refactor the code to switch between a value to a reference. If `.` is used for both, just change the typedef and maybe a couple places. With `.` and `->`, there are maybe thousands of tedious changes to make in the code base. The inevitable result of this is you're not going to attempt such a refactor, as it's too much work. The code stays in the way it was originally designed.

I was able to see this only via broader experience with other languages. I never even noticed the issue before.

C++ addressed this not by fixing it, but by introducing the reference type. But the C++ ref type brings along with it all kinds of new problems, which I won't get into here.

> switch between a value to a reference

your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to an" r-value? This all makes a difference because C is a call-by-value language, and you can't pass a struct, so it's an important distinction to maintain.

This kind of change might be something a student or newb might encounter, but an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one. Maybe on more common a struct containing a struct might switch to a struct containing a pointer to another struct.

personally, I use hungarian and ps->x vs s.x is a nice reinforcement of what hungarian is trying to reinforce. Using parenthesis to illustrate a sort of precedence, I guess I associate the (pointer->) like that as opposed to the (.member) though I can't defend that as making an inordinate amount of sense :)

> an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one

In my and others' extensive experience in C, almost everyone is wrong about where their programs are consuming time. Profiling almost always produces surprising results. Being about to easily refactor programs to experiment with different data organizations is a superpower for a language.

C programs are difficult to refactor, and so they tend to persist with their earliest design decisions despite changing requirements and profile results.

The workers might be distracted by other problems that are literally impossible for the CEO to even simulate, like food insecurity, housing instability, looming medical bankruptcy, etc. I bet the CEO is able to be a much more productive barista without spending company time worrying about those things!

If the CEO is spending a shift working on the line, he still has all his CEO responsibilities to worry about. Those are 24/7, they never stop.

Of course of those problems become too much for the CEO they can always quit.

Well for companies as large as Starbucks, I think most of those responsibilities come down to picking the nicest place for a three martini lunch.

The CEO has the same advantage a new person has coming onto the job and seeing problems.

As soon as you have been in a place 3 or 6 months you are used to all the workarounds and the reasons why things can't be done.

The CEO is just a superior human capable of things others can only dream of.

The CEO should have incredible hustle and ownership, breath of experience, ability to see second order effects in both the business and the market, ability to predict the business environment in the short and long term, ability to plan changes strategically, ability to judge how areas of the business are functioning or impaired, etc.

The job of the CEO is to know as much as possible and take responsibility for it.

That doesn't always happen, but it should.

> Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

If they have a good CEO, they will realize there is an issue with the reporting system and fix that. If not, at least the glaring issue gets resolved, and perhaps someone else is able to use this as evidence to improve the reporting system in the future.

I like your last paragraph a lot, one reason in my experience as to why a problem didn't get reported/fixed is that employees are unfortunately rarely rewarded for fixing processes in large structures (or just once, when the fix itself improves the productivity in a lasting manner).

So a real blocker in my opinion is that there is no clear incentive structure to even think or care about a fix in the first place.

The CEO will care much more about it because their compensation/position is essentially tied to improving this side of the business.

There can also be a lot of what I'll call "political inertia" involved.

In my experience, the existing process has a way of appearing invisible such that any change will feel like more work, even when it isn't. It's hard to improve things when your coworkers perceive you as trying to give them more work.

Agreed. The ideal scheme would be anonymous reporting + objective third party prioritization + financial compensation if benefits realized.

The lack of compensation always baffled me. If an employee comes up with a change that saves the company $x, why don't they get bonused <$x for the year? Win/win.

Make it subject to approval or somesuch, to prevent gaming and weed out edge cases, but every employee should be incentivized to find a way to do their job better.

You aren't paid based off the value you provide. Companies don't know how to measure that anyways. Your salary is based off of how expensive it would be to replace you.

But in this case the measure is clear.

Sales is another job where value is very clear, hence good sales people are often some of the highest paid people in a company.

Value > Salary >= Replacement Cost

Companies can ignore that for awhile, but eventually it needs to be true.

There can even be an opposite incentive, where fixing an issue that was wasting time means more or different work is assigned to everyone

Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe. That's a lot of internal politics for even a motivated regional manager to navigate.

>> Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe.

Really? You think there's a hundred or more executives/managers/supervisors between the CEO and someone on the floor of a SBUX? I'd bet closer to 10.

This is an example of calling someone out for a misstatement that does not change the meaning of their message, and so was probably not necessary to make.

I'd bet closer to six (6), and that can probably be verified (or at least ballparked) by looking at some of their SEC and other disclosures like franchise info.

But that's just direct bosses-boss levels. Doesn't take into consideration things like... PMs, suppliers, customers, Health & Safety (which will vary by locale), unions, security, accounting, HR, public relations & the media, the board of directors, and all of the myriad depts. that will pop up in odd or varied ways.

Maybe not 100 levels, but certainly dozens and dozens of interested parties.

If a manager at each level oversees only two unique people, then an organization with 100 levels has 2^99 + 1 (~a quadrillion quadrillion) employees.

Your point being?

/sarcasm

Even if the problems get reported, this helps the CEO get insight into how to prioritize fixing them, how much to invest in doing so, etc.

It's like observability versus debugging.

Sure, ideally you can get all your actionable information from your metrics, but in reality sometimes to understand what's really happening you just need to step through the code one statement at a time.

The current king of Jordan used to dress as a regular person and ride public transportation. Not sure if to get wisdom or popularity.

> Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?

Probably. But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker. Those managers may not see the effect of a small problem across the entire system. Sometimes those managers have incentive to hide problems to protect their bonus. Other times, the problem seems unimportant. In Starbucks case, a company with a great employer reputation is suddenly facing unionization, so there is a problem there. Unions don't happen because employees are happy.

> if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

In retail, nothing reveals subtle and not so subtle issues faster than being at the point of interaction with customers. Things that might look great on paper or sound good in a meeting at corporate sometimes aren't a good idea. Also, what works in one region, or even at a store across town, might now work well in another. You won't see any of this from a board room or flying in a Gulfstream.

Agreed. I love these people that think that hierarchy is a substitute. It’s the only way to scale but it misses a lot. Talking and actually understanding cross-cutting issues or solvable pain points is the only way. Most people don’t take on a sense of ownership and they infect a culture into being too conservative (which management also encourages because as you get bigger mistakes get amplified).

>But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker.

In my experience, each layer also tends to lessen the severity/criticality. Even when everyone is well intentioned and truthful, you end up with a lot different story/description when it reaches the end of the chain.

> Sometimes those managers have incentive to hide problems to protect their bonus.

I guess one important thing to look out for to judge this as either a PR stunt, or an actual well meaning practice - will be toi see if store managers get any advance notice that the CEO is gonna be working there.

If an ambitious career oriented manager knows the boss is gonna see everything that hopes on tomorrow, you can bet there's be extra staff rostered on the day before to make sure everything is better-that-normally prepped for the next day, that all the most compliant staff and the staff who are most beholden to the manager will be rostered on and they'll all be coached about what to say and threatened if they say the wrong thing, and probably a whole bunch of friends of the manager will show up as stooges on the day cosplaying happy and satisfied "ordinary customers".

> The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem?

Obviously, he's much more intelligent than all those other people, that's why he's the CEO and way richer than them. Rich people are more intelligent and better than poor people in most aspects. That's why the laws favor them.

I understand that your post is sarcasm, but it does bring up the underlying issue of who's been empowered to make changes, and ultimately, who's had (correctly or incorrectly) trust placed in them.

An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were supposed to perform the same rote tasks all day long: hook this device up to the bench, pack this box, unpack that box, and so on. The engineers worked under their engineering managers, and were supposed to perform the _exact samesame_ rote tasks all day: configure devices, pack and unpack boxes.

What really happened was that the engineers found all sorts of ways to optimize the process as they went - and they made them largely without asking anybody. They then shared the optimizations with the other engineers, who followed suit. And they were rewarded by engineering management for finding those optimizations. Later, they propagated back down to the supervisors, who propagated them down to the fulfillment staff.

If the fulfillment staff deviated from their rote tasks, though? They'd have most likely been fired.

This _might_ not be Amazon.

But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon.

(And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)

I can say that this was not Amazon.

I've actually been in this situation. In a past life I was a programmer at a t-shirt printing company. On their first day at the company everyone worked on the line for ~4 hours. I was picking and printing t-shirts on the factory floor. I was able to see how things worked and how they didn't.

But the major factor is I wasn't scared to make or suggest changes in how I worked. Everyone else on the line needed that t-shirt printing job so they just did what they were told. I wasn't afraid of being fired or reprimanded for making changes so I was much more free with my words and work.

"CEO does a day of actual work" is great if it helps the CEO better understand quotidian business process and customer needs.

It is a sham when it's used to counter disagreements from employees.

It happens. Imagine the duty manager has to spend 30 minutes each shift sorting out inventory paperwork because the system is old and slow.

Nobody at the store has any influence, the area managers complain but the project for the new system is low priority.

The CEO has the ability to see that this is a problem and the project needs increased priority.

>Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?

Along similar lines why did the manager's manager not notice the problem? IF the CEO can spend time investigating how the lowest tier workers operate, surely every manager can spend time looking at the tier of workers below his immediate tier.

It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Agreed that information should flow up the chain freely, but there are a lot of incentives working against that, some of which are just human nature (e.g. desire to fix the problems in one's own backyard without escalating.)

> It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Yeah, nah.

Can you imagine any low level AppleStore worker giving Steve Jobs "candid and unfiltered input"???

If that's what you're after, you don't send in a very public top-of-the-org-chart face. At least not in any place with at-will (or right-to-work, whichever it is?) employment laws, where they could fire you on the spot for no reason at all. (Most likely not the CEO doing the firing, but the workers direct or one up or regional manager - who'd just been shown up as worthy of "candid and unfiltered input")

Jeff Bezos used to do similar with Customer Support. He'd meet up with someone in customer support, and shadow their calls for the day. A number of features came out from it, like the ability for customer support to "pull an andon cord" and immediately yank a product from sale pending investigation by senior support staff. It came about because the customer support rep anticipated all of the problems a customer was having with a particular product on a call. "We see this all the time with that product". That annoyed Jeff. There was wisdom, people seeing ways customers were having a bad experience, and they were powerless to do anything about it.

WestJet, Canada's second largest airline, used to do this a lot. I remember handing my coffee cup and trash to Clive Beddoe, one of the original founders, with a double take. They were largely employee-owned and it showed. Then they went public, grew on the backs of shareholders and were taken private again by PE. Now they're worse than Air Canada, the former poster child for terrible airlines.

When a company is young and wants to engage employees I think this type of signaling can work great. When you're the established, mature incumbent and your employees feel they need to unionize to get fair treatment, this is a stunt for the public and not going to change anything internal.

AC gets a lot of undeserved hate. They're better than all the US airlines, without exception and they're on par with a lot of continental European airlines. Much better than BA. There's things they could do better for sure, but onboard service, seats, lounges, ground staff - all solid. Huge improvements to Aeroplan after they bought it back.

After a lot of bouncing around the US it's a treat to fly. I feel like hating on them is something of a Canadian pastime.

Reverse Anecdote: I've had a lot of bad experiences w/ AC, though they generally do better than AA or Delta.

I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.

> Occasionally fairly major changes

like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.

Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.

Any human in the world will believe someone if they experience for themselves. Sometimes it's necessary.

Possibly so, but the man was one of the best salespeople I've ever met. Ice-to-eskimos level, all while being completely genuine. He had a genuine interest in and deep understanding of the customer experience and was easily the equal of any full-time sales staff.

When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able.

Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.

Reminds me of seeing the chairman of a major fashion label do the same thing - dude was so slick, saw him sell the hell out of the place to 3 women before I left.

Disagree. Experiencing something yourself is a whole nother ballgame from being told about it. "You can't tell people anything" [0]. Recognizing this applies to oneself shows intellectual humility IMO.

[0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

People need performance and narrative.

Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value.

Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but there's a role for the other thing too.

You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.

I don't know if toxic is the word for it. No human has infinite capacity for logic or empathy.

Being conscientious takes effort almost by definition. All of us need reminders to put that effort in.

That's why people talk about "getting a seat at the table." If you are physically in a room with someone and they hear your voice and see your face you become more real to them.

We face a choice of either denying the messy parts of human nature (and seeing how that goes) or adapting our processes to account for them.

> Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.

> You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

That's kind of the problem that Starbucks is having right now.

Or rather, it's a symptom of the war its executives are waging on its employees. The former are going to need to do a hell of a lot more then a shift a month to rebuild that trust.

Why not both?

That would work, if Starbucks had that kind of a culture, but they don't.

It is a good way to get exposed to the baristas once a month. When I was a barista there, I saw my manager's manager a few times. I think I knew the name of that person's manager? I think there's at least 2 more layers before the executive in charge of all of the stores.

This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.

pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff.

One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.

There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category.

Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder.

And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data.

E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)

Sure, the decisions by management may make sense based on the data they have, but how stupid are management that they trust information filtered through layers of underlings?

I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.

It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail.

This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one)

Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners.

It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.

I feel like this just highlights the incompetence of executives and management at various levels more than anything else.

The only solution was to take an entire day from the CEO to figure out that the goals were unrealistic? Wasn't the very first clue that stores were generally unable to meet the expected attach rates?

It just highlights this dumb idea that executives are these ungodly force multipliers. I bet if anyone had bothered to ask the day-to-day labor about the proposed attach rates (and actually listened) they wouldn't have had to burn a day's worth of CEO compensation to figure out they weren't achievable.

Why is why the user experience of Apple Retail has gone downhill after he left and Steve Jobs passed away.

From CEO of Dixon, to CEO of Burberry and finally Apple veteran, Deirdre O'Brien. The improvement she made was like many of the recent Mac changes, reverting back to old design.

Ahrendts (of Burberry) was such a weird choice, unless Apple's goal at the time was to maximize in-person watch band sales.

Seems Tim eventually realized selling luxury trench coats isn't very similar to premium computer hardware/software. Meanwhile investors had to pay nearly $200 Million in comp for the privilege of her leading this "town square" fantasy (not sure I'd ever consider a store in the mall a community fixture) while ignoring the internet exists.

Would have rather put ChatGPT in charge of the stores and spent that $200M on improving the software that a Billion Apple users spend time with every day.

Form over function. It's what Apple does.

I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.

In his defense shoppers wanting stuff to appear to be on sale is pretty dumb.

Using an incorrect model of your clientele’s behavior and emotional responses is even dumber.

Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.

The hardest thing for that was that for him to succeed he really needed to play the long game. JCP was and still is eternally screwed. Mall retail is pretty much doomed to die and the ever increasing sale ratios are a side effect of attempts to 'growth hack' their way out of the inevitable. The fact of the matter was that JCP was more expensive than Walmart for, effectively most of their main brands, the same product. Sales allowed JCP to pretend their product is 'worth more'. The problem became a race to the bottom though. Once you say a store-brand Polo should cost '$69.99' but is on sale for $24.99, you start to tell your customer "Our products are overpriced." As ultimately, your product still is more expensive than the $14.99 Walmart product.

By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value.

The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st.

What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.

I didn't see it that way. He took a big swing to do something different and was fired less than two years into it. Maybe you could argue that he was straining against something too strong to overcome or misapplying his lessons from a higher-margin brand, but it's also possible to say that he wasn't given enough time to see it through.

It's like if someone would have taken over Kodak at the turn of the century to go all-in on digital. It would have hurt the company in the short term and kicked against their core business but maybe they would have come out on the other side better off. Impossible to say if the scenario isn't allowed to happen.

His tenure coincides with the beginning of the decline of department stores in general, so you'd have to show that JCPenney fared uniquely worse to say that he ran it into the ground. It still exists, unlike Lord and Taylor and Sears. Doesn't seem to have fared much worse than Macy's, though I didn't do a ton of research here.

Yes, we don't actually know whether it would have worked. He said upfront that it would need more time; apparently he didn't manage upward effectively enough and for some reason the board didn't feel desperate enough to give him more runway.

Department stores had already been declining for a long time before he came along, though.

Was he the guy who promised to make their pricing easier to understand with clearly labelled discounts without coupons? He is. Then he probably did spend time in a store because confusion over sales and extra time at checkout were common at JC Penney. His plan would have made the shopping experience less complicated.

The problem is it didn't translate into improved performance. The opposite actually. Because what customers say and what customers do aren't always the same thing. They may complain that there are too many coupons. But when given the choice they preferred using coupons.

So he got sacked and JC Penney went back to the old pricing scheme. By becoming even more risk-averse no one after him even tried to pull the company out of its death spiral. In hindsight the plan would never have succeeded because the customers who would have appreciated the simpler pricing had already left. The JCP shoppers at that time were coupon hunters who resented the changes. He ignored the existing customers while chasing ex-customers who didn't want to return.

Many years ago I did a few short weeks on an engagement at Wynn casino in Vegas. It overlapped with Christmas time and I was invited to a holiday dinner, which had several thousand people rotate through the huge conference room ballroom over an entire day. Everyone from casino from the dealers to cleaners and cashiers - and even us contractors - rotated through. It was very nice while also yet another unmemorable catered event. It would have remained unmemorable for me except for this part. Someone later asked me if I had some cake, and I said yeah, I went by the cake table and some guy in pink shirt served me a slice, I asked for a small one and he took care of it. Well, apparently that was Steve Wynn, the owners, he I guess did that at the holiday dinner, meeting everyone in a marathon session. I don't know if that is still true but I thought that was a nice way to meet everyone eye to eye.

> “Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic.”

Starbucks doesn’t have a good track record for replacement CEO for Howard Schultz (founder/CEO).

So I’m sure these kind of announcements is to instill confidence with Wall Street that this CEO will work out.

>obviously staff would recognize him

I think it's probable that they wouldn't.

In the bay area, where "oh god, corporate is in the building" is a way of life and common thing you bet they would.

Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.

100% chance that the regional corporate staff gets notice this is happening and goes on a panicked 48-hour cleanup drill to make sure the store is spotless for the incoming exec and make sure the grumpier members of staff are given the weekend off.

Once again, outside the bay area: absolutely true.

In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time.

The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.

Reminds me when I was a bank teller - the area manager would come into our branch sometimes trying to like disguise himself...? But it was always SO obvious after about 10 seconds that it was him while he'd sit in the lobby and observe.

It was also impressive how fast word would go down the teller line that "corporate" was in the branch and everyone would sort of shape up for the hour they were around.

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