BAIS 462 Assignment 7

Are other coffee shops in the Norwood area better than the Xavier University on campus Starbucks?

Proving that the Xavier University Starbucks is Bad.

To prove this, I will be scraping data from Yelp reviews. I am going to scrape the reviews of the on campus Xavier Starbucks and the reviews of other coffee shops in the area, specifically Birdie’s and Cream and Sugar. These are both coffee shops that are generally within walking distance and could be substitutes for the on campus Starbucks for students to go to instead. I will compile 30 reviews from each location to be consistent, since two of the locations only have around 35 reviews.

Students often complain about the quality and service at the on campus Starbucks, so this will explore how the reviews of these locations compare to the on campus Starbucks to see if students would be able to get a better experience elsewhere. Unfortunately, students cannot use their dining dollars at these alternative locations, so that is something to consider.

First, I will scrape this data and load it and any necessary packages to begin the analysis of these reviews for this problem. I will also clean up the data to put it into the right format for analysis.

What are reviewers frequently talking about for each coffee shop?

First, I looked for which words came up in the same reviews frequently to see if there are any patterns. I will remove common words, like coffee, shop, the name of the coffee shops, latte, and any other words that are not important for analysis. For Birdie’s and Starbucks, I included review pairings that have at least 3 occurrences because there was not adequate pairings, but for Cream and Sugar I included review pairings that have at least 5 occurrences. This could potentially mean that Cream and Sugar reviewers talk about similar things, since there are more pairings across the same amount of reviews.

For Birdie’s, people talk frequently about how it is a friendly place, the back likely indicates that people plan to return to the location. People talk about it being a work place, they can likely go there to work on their laptops and have a cup of coffee. They talk about the service, the vibe, generally there seems to be positive review pairings.

For Cream and Sugar, people similarly say it is a friendly place that they will return to, they compliment the staff and describe the food and drinks as delicious. The one pairing that might be negative is the pairing of food and time. This could either indicate that the food takes time, or that it came out quickly.

Finally, for Starbucks, reviewers compliment the location and the service and drinks. Some notable pairings are drinks line, which could indicate that the line is long, they also bring up the system frequently which could reference the dining dollars system for students which has experienced issues in the past. Another interesting pairing is worst and drink, which is self explanatory. Overall, the Starbucks seems to have more questionable pairings compared to the other locations so far.

Word Clouds!

As another way of examining what reviewers are frequently talking about, I created word clouds for each of the coffee shops. I required that each of the words be used at least 5 times in reviews. I also removed the word coffee from the clouds.

As we saw before, for Birdies there isn’t many negative words, people talk about it being great that is friendly and. For Cream and Sugar, people talk about it being great, friendly, delicious. However, the words wait and time are present which can indicate some people complain about long wait times.

For Starbucks, the words minutes, time, and line are much more prevalent than for the other local coffee shops. The word pay is also present which is notable, this could be because students talk about being able to pay with dining dollars, but this could be explored further to better understand. People talk about the location, the service, and the workers.

Which Coffee Shop has the most negative reviews?

I went through the words of the reviews of each coffee shop and pulled any reviews that had negative or positive words in the reviews. Then I graphed how often the positive or negative words appeared for all words that appear in reviews at least three times. I removed any words that might be neutral or difficult to interpret, because it is uncertain what those are referring to in this context.

Based on these graphs, Birdies had no negative scoreable words in their reviews, while cream and sugar and starbucks had negative reviews. For Cream and Sugar, one of the words is small, which could be about the location being a small business or drinks being small, but it is hard to interpret. The other word is wait, which could indicate long wait times. For Starbucks, they have limited positive reviews and a negative word, which is bad. We also saw before that Cream and Sugar seemed to have more words compared to the other two, so it is hard to come to a conclusion, but based on these graphs alone Cream and Sugar has more negative words in their reviews.

On what days of the week does Starbucks have the most positive reviews?

Using the bing lexicon, we will find the average positive score for the coffee shops. This will help see if there are certain days that the coffee shops are more successful.

Starbucks does much worse during the beginning of the week, with the lowest point on Mondays and Sundays were they went negative. During the weekends they seem to have much more success with positive reviews. Saturday is most notable since it is the only day that Starbucks manages to beat the other locations. Starbucks also does not have any reviews from a Wednesday. They have the highest positivity scores on Thursdays, they tend to run discounts like BOGO or other promotions on Thursdays which might contribute. Overall, Starbucks seems to have significantly less positive reviews compared to the other locations in the area around Xavier’s Campus.

Birdies beat our Cream and Sugar in the positivity score on Monday but fell short every other day, Cream and Sugar appears to have the highest positivity scores generally, followed by Birdies, and then finally with Starbucks trailing in last.