/r/starbucks attempts economics

wdym?

Lol have you seen the goblinas who work at sbux? It's all dangerhairs and genderqueers and obese he-shes who steal from the pastry case to stuff their maw. Nothing a sane person would want to look at

Good point. Starbucks can't compete on coffee quality but they've got the sugared caffeine market cornered. That stuff is harder to replicate at home too because no supermarket could sell ingredients with those kinds of nutritional values and it's harder to combine everything with the blenders and whipping and syrups.

More like CATpuccino

If I'm buying for utility, I obviously go for an iced white chocolate macadamia nut shaken espresso.

But sometimes I wake up and I'm in that venti vanilla bean frappucino with 2 scoops of dragon fruit mood

Ok so quartz (the ) reacts to pressure in such a way that it can generate an electrical current very reliably. This is the mechanism through which electric cigarette lighters, sonar, and many other technologies function.

Before circuit boards though, the motors were quite bulky. Above is a picture of the first 1927 Bell Telephone laboratories quartz clock. This technology is much more accurate than a traditional watch movement, which operates by a steel spring or by a pulley system operating a pendulum (the first type of clock invented). Until the development of atomic clocks in the 60s this was the best technology had to offer and it was used by the military and other government agencies standardizing measures of time.

Wrist watches thus fall into three categories: hand-wound movements where you have to wind the spring yourself, automatics (like you'd see in a modern Rolex) which winds the spring through the movement of your arm, and quartz. For the development of the quartz wristwatch though we still had to wait for the development of cheap consumer printed circuit boards (PCBs). This technology was invented in the 1930s and by the time WW2 rolled around PCBs were used in mines and bombs for the fuse. They still are, and IEDs are often made with fuses built from wrist watches like the cheap and reliable Casio F-91W.

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All watches used to be all-mechanical, with springs and gears and flywheels and no battery. An automatic watch is a mechanical watch that's powered automatically by your wrist swinging as you walk rather than having to periodically hand-wind the watch. "Movement" refers to the timekeeping mechanism inside the watch.

In the 60s they invented quartz watches, which work electronically by making a tiny piece of quartz vibrate at a specific frequency, then taking that frequency and feeding it into the hands of a watch/clock/etc. This is way, way simpler than mechanical watches and also more accurate (and the watches require less maintenance, they're more shock resistant, they don't have to be worn or wound regularly to keep time, etc etc etc), so quartz watches are just straight up objectively better than mechanical watches if you want to tell time (this was before smartphones so nearly everyone had to wear a watch).

The quartz crisis was when everyone suddenly went from buying mechanical watches to buying these objectively better, cheaper, japanese quartz watches, which nearly bankrupted the entire Swiss watch industry because the Swiss had built a national identity around their fancy, mechanical watches and refused to adopt the cheap, mass produced quartz ones. A whole bunch of really big watch companies went out of business and the Japanese watch industry overtook the Swiss.

The Swiss response to this was to switch from making watches for everyone to making ultra fancy watches, focusing on "heritage", and pumping up their prices to the stratosphere. A rolex that cost you $200 in 1970 ($1600 today) is now about $15,000, and that's one of the more reasonably priced brands. You can easily get into the hundreds of thousands or millions for a plain watch with no precious metals that keeps time worse than a $5 children's toy, but people will tell you it's justified because of the craftsmanship or heritage or whatever. It's like designer clothes, but with the prices increased by a few orders of magnitude.

Grand Seiko's spring drive is a hybrid mechanical/quartz design, entirely mechanically powered but using quartz to regulate the movement so it can keep time much more accurately than purely mechanical watches. It can maintain +- 15 seconds per month, which is comparable to crappy quartz watches. Rolex will get you +- a minute per month, and high end quartz can get you to +- a second per year or nearly-perfect accuracy through the use of various things that broadcast the current time.

tldr: watches are a status symbol, use your phone to tell the time. Also Rolex and their dealers can all go die in a fire for all I care frick them I hate them all