Experience Economy: Birthday Party Cuisine

1 INTRODUCTION

The entire history of economic progress can be summarized in the four-stage evolution of the birthday party cuisine. As a remnant of the Agrari-an Economy, mothers made salads, birthday cakes, etc. mixing farm commodities (vegetables, flour, eggs, and dairy products) which costed almost nothing. As the goods-based Industrial Economy appeared, moth-ers paid some money for premixed ingredients to save their time and power for other activities. Later, when the Service Economy advanced, busy parents ordered ready-made salads and cakes from grocery stores or bakeries, even though it was a lot more expensive than premixed ingredi-ents. Nowadays, more and more parents do not cook for the parties and do not even organize them. Instead,

Therefore, in order to create greater value, businesses are starting to arrange memorable events for their customers, and that memory itself becomes the product called "Ex-perience".

The term “Experience Economy” was first described in a book written by Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in 1990, titled “The Experience Economy”. The term was described as a next economy following the Agrarian, the Industrial and the Service Economies, and is considered as a foundation for customer experience management.

However, Pine and Gilmore’s thesis has been criticized as an example of an over-hyped business philosophy. So, moving away from producing goods and services towards staging experiences – is it the way of the fu-ture or is it just a

But when the 21st century started, the boundaries for trade disappeared and economy recovered, people started to buy “innova-tive” black, green, red, yellow tea with different flavors, and ordinary tea did not bring satisfaction any more. What is happening now – the reader would wonder… Now “Bubble Tea” entered the country. Bubble tea is a drink originating in Taiwan in the 1980s, characterized by the addition of tapioca or yam starch pearls filled with yogurt, juice or jelly, into a tea/coffee/milk with syrups. People, especially youth, are so excited about it because they are free to choose whatever they want to add into their own-designed Bubble Tea, and the taste that comes out is so weird. The funny thing is that even if the person did not like Bubble Tea at all, the probability that he/she will come for it again, and then again and again, is still high because of emotions and experience that consumer gets during the process of choosing, tasting and biting tapioca bubbles through. Do the youth still remember about flavored tea? Can flavored tea still delight them? Who knows, who