Consistency Is Good
Apr 4th, 2008 by mark
Walk into any store-front Chinese restaurant and order a fried rice variant, be it shrimp, chicken, pork, or combination, and you’ll get almost exactly the same thing, regardless of where you are. Rice, cubed carrots, peas, some onion perhaps, soy sauce, and the meat of your choice. Oh, and soy sauce for color and flavor. The portion will be sufficiently large to fill you and then some, for less than $10. Probably less than half that at lunchtime.
McDonald’s has made an industry out of serving you the same tasteless meal regardless of which of the billions and billions of franchises you visit. Consistency makes them popular; there’s none of the “I don’t know what to get” angst at McDonald’s. Fried rice is the quiet consistency meal at budget Chinese restaurants. For that matter, most of the menu is consistent from one Chinese restaurant to the next.
What sets the Chinese consistency apart, to my way of thinking, from McDonald’s or any of the national fast food chain marquees, is that they are universally independent. They tend to be family run affairs rather than an organized collection of locations leveraging economies of scale.
They are an example of emergent behavior, of bottom up organization. Somehow the word went out that Americans expect rice, carrot, peas, onion, soy sauce, and a bit of chicken, shrimp, or pork in their fried rice. Which leaves me with this question: did the Chinese restauranteurs shape our expectation of fried rice, or did we shape their menu offering through demand?
I expect it’s probably a combination of both effects, starting with a fairly open set of possibilities, and then being nudged by a combination of what customers liked (or expected) to eat, and what the owners found easy/cheap/whatever to prepare. Of course consistency probably plays a big role now, as you said, and finding the point at which consistency became a big factor would probably be interesting.
Incidentally (moving to a completely different topic), I’ve been a subscriber here for a month or two (I was sent your way from Shawn Blanc’s blog, and what I read here looked interesting enough to subscribe to), and I wanted to mention that this has become one of my most frequently read sites. You write about a wide variety of things here, but the content is always both well-written and interesting, and I’d just like to thank you for your writing.