Comparative Analysis of Coffee Franchises in the Cambridge-Boston Area May 10, 2010 ESD.86: Models, Data, and Inference for Socio-Technical Systems Paul T. Grogan
[email protected] Massachusetts Institute of Technology Introduction The placement of storefronts is a difficult question on which many corporations spend a great amount of time, effort, and money. There is a careful interplay between environment, potential customers, other storefronts from the same franchise, and other storefronts for competing franchises. From the customer’s perspective, the convenience of storefronts, especially for “discretionary” products or services, is of the utmost importance. In fact, some franchises develop mobile phone applications to provide their customers with an easy way to find the nearest storefront.1 This project takes an in-depth view of the storefront placements of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, two competing franchises with strong presences in the Cambridge-Boston area. Both franchises purvey coffee, coffee drinks, light meals, and pastries and cater especially well to sleep-deprived graduate students. However, Dunkin’ Donuts typically puts more emphasis on take-out (convenience) customers looking to grab a quick coffee before class whereas Starbucks provides an environment conducive to socializing, meetings, writing theses, or studying over a longer duration. These differences in target customers may drive differences in the distribution of storefronts in the area. The goal of this project is to apply some of the concepts learned in ESD.86 on probabilistic modeling and to the real-world system of franchise storefronts and customers. The focus of the analysis is directed on the “convenience” of accessing storefronts, determined by the distance to the nearest location from a random customer.