Given Starbucks’ news that it’s closing most of its Australian branches, it was amusing to read Joel Spolsky’s piece on Starbucks and their sales techniques.

I’ve got my own opinions of Starbucks’ product, but I’m not a coffee drinker anyway. Ultimately I think the analysts are right: Starbucks misread the market. Most Australians simply aren’t interested in the bewildering variety of flavours offered to North American customers.

Also an interesting read, in the business pages last Saturday: Aldi’s simple recipe for success. Seems Aldi are doing a bit better with their Australian expansion. But I just love the bit about the two Albrecht brothers deciding to do their own thing, and how they determined where each would trade. They used the standard sibling method:

They got a map of Germany. One of the brothers drew a line and the other had to choose which part of the country he would take.

Spot the disclaimer at the top of the page?

It’s because a growing number of journos seem to be finding my blog. Certainly nothing wrong with that; nice to see they’re on the cutting edge, gathering information from far and wide. Welcome, media people from everywhere!

But I’ve had to emphasise to them that my semi-coherent rambling (particularly about local buses) here isn’t necessarily PTUA policy. Actually it probably matches in intent most of the time, but here I’m likely to be a bit more ranty. So I thought I’d better pop the disclaimer in. I don’t think media people would just quote bits of my blog as if it was PTUA comment — they all seem more careful than that — but trying to make sure.