John Smith <deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com> writes: > On 5 May 2010 09:22, Steve Bennett <stevag...@gmail.com> wrote: >> (Just to make life even hearder: is McCafe a cafe or fast food?) > > Maybe it's all three at the same time... > > Does it have a sit down and eat area.... restaurant > Is the food delievered in less than 5 minutes (usually)... fast_food > Is there a distinctive "cafe" section which primarily does coffee and > muffins.... cafe
I think our focus on "objectivity" is excessive. Tags are fundamentally about communicating what a place is to others. <us-centric> At least in US society, there is fairly broad agreement about what is a "fast food place" vs a "cafe", and I'd expect the same notion in most other cultures - certainly in Europe. Even the people who say that a fact-based decision is hard to make would answer the same way as almost everyone if asked "Don't try to be difficult. Guess whether most people in the US would call this 'fast food' vs 'cafe'."</> The entire reason such tagging is useful (vs. amenity=food) is that people can ask "find me a nearby cafe". When I ask that, I want a coffee shop that serves sandwiches, or a sandwich shop that serves coffee, or something like that -- that I'm likely to be glad I went to. I definitely don't want McDonald's (to which I've probably been 3 times in the last 10 years and try to keep it that way) or Dunkin Donuts (big company massive chain of coffee/donuts, with no local charm) - or I would have asked for fast food. One of the key distinctions in practice is that mega-corpooration heavily-advertised pseudofood is "fast food", and independent coffee shops are "cafe". At least that's how everyone I know sees it. You can call this bias and subjectivity, but I call it communication based on a shared vocabulary. So the key question is: for a tag choice, is there some shared agreement in society about what the words mean. Of course, there are marginal calls; Chipotle might be one such case. Here, you might not get a consisent answer if you grabbed 100 random people, had them eat there, and then quizzed them. But if you sent those 100 people to McDonald's, you'd get at least 99 saying "fast food", and if you sent them to http://www.sweet-bites.com/inner.htm then 99 of them would say cafe. So I suggest we do the mental experiment, and go with the result.
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