Outside of North America, same-store sales slid 7%. In China, Starbucks’ second-largest market, same-store sales tumbled 14% as both average ticket and transactions shrank. Starbucks has faced stiffer competition in China from local coffee shops that undercut the coffee giant on price.
And that is the problem. Starbucks is not offering anything that doesn’t already exist. It pretends to be a coffee shop for the upper class because it sounds “sophisticated” to say grande instead of medium.
I no longer go there. I know local coffee shops that offer a much better selection of coffees at a good price. And their atmosphere is authentic.
On reddit maybe be 12 years ago was a post about what it’s like to work there and apparently employees will straight up rage hate you if you say you don’t speak Starbucks.
I get how there are people who don’t follow politics, but man… how do you avoid news like this?
I mean, technically, she’s not in until the convention… but you would think it would be common knowledge unless you’re a recluse or a child who doesn’t know most people by name.
Someone more famous than I (Meryl Streep?) once suggested that upon graduation, one should be mandated to drive a taxi for a year, just to see what it’s “really like” out there.
You’ll have to take my word for it, she’s so right.
People still talk about litter boxes in schools for the furries - with a phone attached to their palms 24/7 that’ll PROVE to them in seconds that it never happened…and, yet…
People still talk about litter boxes in schools for the furries - with a phone attached to their palms 24/7 that’ll PROVE to them in seconds that it never happened…and, yet…
…yet they find that one thread on Nextdoor where one person claimed that it happened in their child’s classroom and a lot of self-righteous pearl clutching. Therefore, that must be the truth.
I just worked customer service for a decade. After awile you just take it in stride when an adult is functionally illiterate. Leaving aside the people who think Democrat and Republican have to do with the dictionary definitions of Democracy and Republic and nothing else.
… You started off with a supposed true story that you want people to believe, but somewhere it turned to sarcasm. I’m not sure what to believe anymore.
I know we’re all in our own occasionally overlapping echo chambers, but the betting odds and prediction markets still tend to favor Trump, some of the larger ones pretty heavily. It’s very disconnected from the narrative I’ve been seeing about Kamala here and elsewhere, I hope that narrative is right, but still doesn’t line up.
Why do I keep seeing people putting stock in “betting markets”? … Somehow professional gamblers became respected replacements for polls some and I do not get it
I think the justification is that people will be more honest/rational when betting their own money.
It’s probably less irrational than stock markets, since there’s a very clear time horizon people are betting on, and data like polls can be pretty good. But since they’re looking at essentially the same data as pundits, it’s unsurprising they tend to do about as well.
It’s real easy to make polls go whichever way you like if you try and it may be in someoned best interest to make sure only the ‘correct’ polls are widely known. We’re spoiled in that we’ve been able to expect the organizations involved to be trustworthy and not do that, but I think a lot of us feel that that’s been less and less true.
For the betting markets, their success relies almost solely on them predicting odds correctly and consistently. Our respect here is for the people who dedicate their lives to making sure the gamblers lose. Could obviously still be manipulated, but in this case doing so is at least contrary to the purpose of the organization instead of in the previous case potentially actually supporting it…
Not going to lie though, is a weird shift, I get it.
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Yeah, I’ve seen and met Venezolanos passing through my country seeking asylum here and in the US. The tales they tell about the conditions in their country are harrowing. And with those living conditions perpetuated by those in power, you think I’m gonna think otherwise? With other governments calling this into question and given their previous dictator, why would anyone think it was a fair election?
I want to hear from you. What makes you think this was fair? Speak.
Well, I do make judgments on the affairs of other nations based on “a history of behavior” and I’m free to post my opinion. I’m not here for your petty and aimlessly pedantic bs. Consider yourself blocked.
Huh? This is not me blocking someone over opposing views. Are we reading the same thread? I’m blocking someone who I found painfully pedantic for demanding evidence over a throwaway comment in an incredibly informal forum and treating it like it’s some sort of official statement. It’s a smug, clueless, and self-serving attempt to “keep people accountable” without regard for context. If anything, this person is trying to shut me up by using demanding evidence as a weapon.
So yeah, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t accuse me of things that didn’t happen.
Venezuelan here. It’s difficult to understand if you are not familiar with Venezuelan law, but bear with me.
We vote electronically. There’s a registry of citizens, paired with biometric data, so everyone votes only once. Every ID is linked to a single voting center, and a single voting poll within that center. Each voting machine will only let people registered to vote there. Each person who votes is given a tiny paper receipt that they must personally deposit in a voting urn. At the end of the election there’s a tally, electronic, the machine then prints that tally along with several cryptographic hashes. These hashes are a mix of poll station authorities keys and the numbers reported. Every poll station has authorities and witnesses from each party. This tallies and copies of them are distributed to these people and to as many people as there is print paper and ink available. Lay people are allowed to witness said process and keep a copy of the tally, with only limits to the building’s capacity and material available. Finally, the machine transmits the same data as in the tally papers via an internet encrypted connection to a single totalization center. Then each center is free to audit the tallies by opening the urns in one or all the poll stations and count them by hand to make sure it matches the electronic tally.
There should be witnesses from each party inside the totalization center to see the process of totalization live. Then the election authorities must print the bulletins from the totalization center and publish the results in their entirety, proclaim the results etc. All of this is constitutional law.
Now, for what really happened. At several voting centers witnessed were forbidden from keeping printed tallies. Some places even used violence from the armed forces. Witnesses from all parties except two where forbidden to enter the totalization center by intelligence forces right at the door. The results transmission was halted by the electoral authorities at 20% of data transmitted, no explanation given (they alleged later that North Macedonia hacked the system, I’m not kidding). Then, one of the only witnesses allowed inside claims that the results with Maduro winning read by the electoral president were not printed inside the totalization center, but elsewhere. This is illegal. The results announced were allegedly with 60% of the data. The announcement claims that the results were irreversible. This a technical term, defined by law and statistical sciences, that means that even if the losing candidate had 75% or more of the remaining votes it would not alter the announced winner. But this was not true, for the data as announced.
Now, for how the fraud is being proven. The opposition leader worked for months on creating a network of witnesses with the sole job of gathering printed tallies from each and every polling station at the end of the voting. This tallies were digitized and given to the opposition party for them to totalize on their own. This data was published today on a web page with roughly 80% of the tallies from all polling stations obtained. They show an entirely different result than what the electoral authority claims. Each cryptographic hash is visible and verifiable. People with tallies have been checking and proving that they are consistent with what they have and the hashes match correctly.
Finally, the election authority certified Maduro without publishing the detailed results by polling station. This is also illegal, as certification of results must only happen with 100% of the results tallied and published. Today the web page of the CNE remains offline and no detailed results can be officially seen. This is why most Democratic governments and international institutions are calling for the government to publish the tallies fully, as is our law.
That seems pretty damning. I could certainly believe a hack (with the understanding that just because it seemed to come from N Macedonia that doesn’t mean it was the origin), but that doesn’t explain anything else.
Here’s a fun nerd mathematical sidetrack that proves the fraud further for anyone who is reading. Let’s talk percentages.
When we express a proportion of a number against a total we are making percentages. Element/Total * 100 = %. Usually, we get percentages with a lots of decimal places, proportions are rarely exact in real life, so we must round somehow if we want to report numbers with less decimals. This means that if we try to reverse the process, find out the numbers starting from the percentages, we get errors, as information was lost during rounding. This error is usually between the bounds of one percent point. It’s extremely rare for this process to be perfectly reversible.
When looking at the numbers announced by the electoral authority, however, this strange phenomena happens, not once, not twice, but three times. Let me show you. The results as announced were:
Maduro with 51.2% of the votes or, 5,150,092 votes
Edmundo Gonzalez with 44.2% of the votes or, 4,445,978 votes
Other candidates, aggregated 4.6% or, 462,704 votes shared by 8 different candidates.
You are free to do the math with me, step by step, get your calculator app out.
The total of votes considered are 10,058,774 votes.
Let’s look at their proportions:
5150092/10058774 = 0.5119999~
4445978/10058774 = 0.4419999~
462704/10058774 = 0.460000~
Hmmm
Well, let’s try to derive those numbers back. A percentage point is Total/100
10058774/100 = 100587.74
So we could expect an error of anywhere from 50,000 votes over or under when we try to derive the totals from the percentages.
Let’s see what happens if we try to derive the total amount of votes from the percentages. Element/% * 100 = Total
5150092/51.2*100 = 10058773.4375
4445978/44.2*100 = 10058773.755~
462704/4.6*100 = 10058782.608~
Oh my.
You can try this on your own with made up numbers and you’ll notice that it is almost impossible, statistically speaking, for this to happen.
Let’s run random numbers from random.org.
Total: 6,105,472
A: 4,705,638
B: 1,399,834. B will be the remainder.
Lets’ get some percentages and round them for good measure:
A = 77.072468~ Let’s say 77.1%
B = 22.927531~ Roughly 22.9%
That’s 100% right there, so let’s derive.
The percentage point is 61054.72
A: 4705638/77.1 * 100 = 6103291.828793~
B: 1399834/22.9 * 100 = 6112812.227074~
As you can see, we can’t derive the total from the percentages, as the percentages were rounded. The variation is well within the percent point error, but unless we have each and every single one of the decimal places of the percentages, we will never know the exact total the numbers come from (there are mathematical ways but they’re irrelevant in this analysis).
Looking at the numbers announced, we can only deduce that, statistically speaking, the votes were most likely calculated with exact percentages chosen before hand instead of the percentages being calculated from the votes then rounded. As it is an unlikely probability they were naturally exact.
They made up the results and announced them. There’s now plenty of proof that the election was stolen.
Disregard symbolic prizes, share this information with anyone within hear shot. Venezuela is a dictatorship and this election was stolen. People are being murdered in their homes right as we speak to keep a dictator in power. Call your government authorities and pressure them to take this matter seriously and put international pressure on Venezuela for this regime to end.
Que rabia da lo que sucedió y es algo que personalmente no espero que los gringos o los demás angloparlantes aquí vayan a entender. Que un día lleguen elecciones justas a Venezuela.
Traffic to its U.S. stores fell again [...] dropping 6%. Domestic same-store sales fell 2%, boosted by an increase in average ticket.
So they had less people come in, and their response was to raise prices.
Last quarter, executives discussed plans to revive the lagging U.S. business that included leaning on discounts
Ah, yes, temporarily lower prices that you'll need to install their tracking app for, I'm sure. They'll use it to dial in the price-point at which each customer is willing to buy, offer "discounts" to just above that price, and then boil-the-frog until it reaches a price acceptable to corporate ...
Starbucks used to be a pretty decent place. I mean, your preference for how the coffee tasted aside…they used to have newspapers, magazines, couches and other comfy furnishings, nice seating, the pastries were fresh, pretty damn good, and there was a decent variety. Decent coffee-making merch for sale, too. Their menu was coffee and espresso drinks. None of this choco-frosted-sugar-ice-bomb with coffee as an afterthought - if there’s any in the drink at all.
Now? Cheap-ass furniture that invites you to take your coffee and gtfo. Buy a mug or insulated plastic drink glass. Pastries? Let’s pop those out of a plastic bag. Coffee? Minimal. Now it’s the aforementioned sugary drinks or other fruity drinks that have no coffee at all. There is no reason to go there unless your diabetes needs a challenge.
Literally the only thing keeping me buying Starbucks is the loyalty app that gets me a free bag of coffee a couple times a year. Otherwise I’d go elsewhere. Once the loyalty program stops paying out, I’m gone.
It is very weaselly, but I gotta also note that this language is directly answering ethical obligations for judges.
Judges must not only avoid impropriety but also the appearance of impropriety (the judicial branch is only as strong as the will for people to believe in it. If a judge harms the confidence in this branch, they need to be removed).
So what he’s saying here is that it doesn’t matter if it’s impropriety or appearance of impropriety, he has an obligation to step down.
Like I said, very slimy, but he’s not just doing politicical rhetoric, he’s directly addressing his ethical obligations.
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