What makes a quality burger chain? A quality sushi chef? A quality golfer? What would make your life better quality?

What. Is. Quality?

Billions of dollars a year are spent to dissect, decompose and deconstruct this singularly crucial question with nothing tangible to show for it. Why is that? I believe the answer lies between two lightly grilled buns.

Here’s an exercise just for fun. The next time you pass through a city in California, find some locals and ask them what the best burger in California is. If you are a California local, or have lived there long enough to know the lay of the land, ask yourself the same question. No cheating.

I would venture a bet that a large percentage if not most of your responses, including your own if you are a local, would point, not to some $22 foie gras topped concoction you might find in some swanky restaurant in Santa Monica, but a humble burger dubbed the Double Double which can be had for something on the order of three dollars and fifty cents.

In fact, ask any Californian ex pat who has spent time away from home and ask them which top 3 food establishments they miss most. Once again, I would venture a bet that most if not all respondents would have the home of the Double Double on their list, i.e. In-N-Out.

Founded by a family of devout Christians in 1948, In-N-Out’s focus on value, i.e. consistently high quality food at a reasonable price, has created a cultish following among west coasters. While other fast food menus have grown to increasingly unwieldy scales over the decades, In-N-Out’s menu looks today almost exactly as it did in 1948. As in, they sell burgers, shakes and fries. That’s it.

In-N-Out stands as one of the clearest examples in my mind of “do something simple and do it extraordinarily well”. While this is certainly not the only way to drive towards a high quality result, it has worked wonders for In-N-Out and the founding family which continues to run it today.

But we’ve glossed over something important here. What exactly does it mean to be consistently “high quality”? What is “quality” for that matter? Why the heck do so many people (including myself) reminisce so fondly about a humble burger from a single-mindedly simple restaurant establishment?

Is it the taste? Is it the consistency? Is it the fact that it is less than $4? How can we know definitively that this burger is a high quality burger? Is this burger intrinsically tasty? Is its burger-ness approaching some platonic ideal of burger-dom?

Or is there something else going on here that is more universal?

The Double Double is a Fiber Optic

When I first came across Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I didn’t know quite what to expect. Perusing Amazon reviews led me to believe that this was an interesting book on philosophy with a handyman twist but not necessarily a tour de force. I was wrong.

Robert Pirsig’s book is the most important work in recent collective memory.

In recalling a cross-country motorcycle trip between an estranged father and son, Pirsig’s work is largely autobiographical. The father, who serves as the narrator of the novel, reflects on his past life as a troubled teacher at a small college. Through the course of the book, the narrator becomes obsessed with defining the concept of Quality (he denotes Quality with a big “Q”) which he believes to be inherently undefinable, a frustratingly irreconcilable paradox.

It is the undefinable nature of Quality that the narrator, and, in turn, Pirsig, believes is the root of some of modern society’s most misguided pursuits. Similar to our prior example of the humble Double Double, the trouble, Pirsig poses, is that the modern scientific method is obsessed with measurement and observation at the specific exclusion of any form of subjectivity.

While this has worked for innumerable scientific discoveries to date and is credited with progression of society from the Industrial Revolution through the Internet era, Pirsig argues we are beginning to reach diminishing returns from science’s ability to improve our well-being despite what seems like an acceleration of technological advances year after year.

The problem is, even as we build faster, stronger, smarter things, we have still never been sure whether we are actually building better things. The scientific method assumes all things can be objectively measured and therefore understood. Quality, an inherently subjective and personal concept, defies this assumption and thus forever evades the grasp of the scientific method. But that doesn’t stop science from trying.

The economic motivations for trying is relatively rational. Imagine, if you will, you had a little black box that automatically understood and calculated the quality of something and told you, in discrete numerical terms, how to replicate it. A recipe if you will. Imagine this formula could be universally applied to all things, from rock bands to politics to crème brulee. Whoever owned this little black box would, not wholly fantastical, probably rule the world.

In the history of mankind, Google’s PageRank algorithm has probably come closest to replicating this “black box”. And we’ve seen how well it’s done for them. And yet, even so, now that we have the power of search at our finger tips, the definition of quality still remains elusive. Is it a string or a particle? Or are we not even asking the right questions?

A question like, for example, how do you truly measure “quality”? Revisiting the Double Double, we know it’s a good quality burger, but how do we measure this “burger-ness” in discrete “burgometers™”? As absurd as this question sounds, billions of dollars a year are shoveled into consumer research to try to answer questions just like this. In fact, $6.7bn are spent every year in the United States alone on this exact type of marketing research. Year after year, time, effort and capital are thrown at unlocking the mysteries of quality. And they are completely missing the point.

Study after study focuses on the symptoms but rarely the cause. Statistical analyses break down demographic preferences. Marketing consultants do countless surveys on customer feedback. While this work can help point someone in the right direction, they often miss the forest through the trees.

Again, let’s take the Double Double. I am sure studies have attempted to tie the Double Double’s ingredients, salt content, umami and freshness levels et al with the concept of “quality” in the hopes that by duplicating those various discrete metrics, they could in effect recreate the singular success of In-N-Out, the “black box” recipe if you will. And they are ultimately doomed to failure.

Don’t get me wrong, some may get close to scientifically and methodically recreating a single In-N-Out burger (see link below, kudos to J. Kenji López-Alt and his masterful effort to reverse engineer the humble Double Double), but there will never be a perfect replication of its success as whole.

Pirsig’s central thesis can shed some light on why this is so; Quality is not a singular trait to be measured by an observer. It is not a “thing” to be observed. It is the act of observing itself. Or experiencing. Or feeling. Or tasting. Quality exists in the relationship between two things. Between an actor and his audience. Between a scientist and his subject. And, yes, even between a hungry human and his burger. Without hyperbole but perhaps with some irony, this scientifically rational conclusion on the limits of scientific reason is Pirsig’s lasting gift.

If this is true, if quality is in fact not inherent to an object but rather in the eye of the beholder, then how can we ever hope to understand it? Shouldn’t then the concept of big “Q” Quality be as varied and innumerous as there are observers in the world? Well, yes, actually. But the fact that, even with this diversity of opinion, a legion of people still found a common love in In-N-Out shows that there is perhaps a stronger, more universal, relationship at play here.

As hinted earlier, the success of In-N-Out is rooted in the singular focus of its founding family to creating consistently fresh and delicious burgers at a reasonable price. All the work they put in to maintain this as a collective organization is felt by its customers. So can you see where the quality relationship lies in this case? Which parties are on either end of the two tin cans and a string?

Let’s start with the symptom and pinch-zoom out, CSI style. The Double Double is tasty, yes, but if you take one step back from the burger, you see that its tastiness was a result of the care with which the employee cooked the burger and prepared it. You take a step back from that and you see that great care was taken to train the employee and maintain a culture of excellence. Zoom out further, and you see this great care extends to the organization’s very supply chain which delivers fresh ingredients directly from two plants in Texas and California without ever being frozen, geographically limiting its own expansion to ensure that this vital piece of quality control stays intact. You take a step back from that and you see that it is the guiding principle of the original founders and their focus on quality, value and consistency above all else (including revenue growth and global fast food domination) that drives each of these actions from macro to micro to your mouth.

Ultimately, if you agree that quality is defined as a relationship rather than an inherent trait, what does this mean? That it takes everyone from the Founders to the meat suppliers, to the truck drivers, to the managers, and finally down to the line cook focused on producing a quality result, being “in the zone” if you will, to ensure that you consistently experience a quality result.

No easy task. From the individual up to the organization, they are just cooking burgers in some sense, but in another they are using the burger to satisfy, nay, to communicate with their customers the following: “You matter. You are worth the effort. And you deserve this awesome burger. Enjoy.”

You deserve this awesome burger… You don’t need to see this mission statement written down to know that it is true. You feel it, you taste it, it resonates within you. The burger, as they say, speaks for itself. This is a product of a high quality relationship, an effect. While there are a lot of potential causes for this effect, the most critical driver for In-N-Out’s quality is a deep-felt connection with and concern for its customers, a type of corporate empathy if you will.

As an organization, In-N-Out sustains this empathy across its entire employee base exceptionally well, transmitting it from the Founders on down to the line cooks. The last leg of this vital transmission is through its food. In this way, the Double Double is like a fiber optic connecting In-N-Out with its customers. The message it carries is strong and consistent. Go to any of their 300 restaurants and you will find this connection expertly and meticulously maintained.

This deep-felt empathy and concern is core to high quality signals, it shrinks the distance between the sender and the receiver. The medium In-N-Out chose, in this case a burger, was one they were uniquely passionate and knowledgeable about. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the diversity of mediums available is as broad as the people who master them. Whether “you deserve” an inspiring ballet performance, a stirring oratory, a ground-breaking scientific discovery, a solid steel foundation, a heartfelt sermon or an expertly-refined petroleum, the message contained within any truly high quality relationship is ultimately very similar: “I want to share this with you because you matter.” But the diversity of mediums also matters. It is the spice of life. And that is what truly makes a Double Double so delicious.