At the coffee pot just now I was speaking with a colleague about an old Starbucks drink called chantico, which was a very rich, very strong, very sweet hot chocolate drink.

It was delicious, but you could only drink one every other week or so if you wanted to live until next month.

They discontinued it after a short while, and I had always thought people simply didn’t like it. But just now I googled it and found this old article, which claims that chantico died because the customers couldn’t customize it.

Starbucks seems to appeal to the kind of personality you really don’t want in a spouse — i.e., the need to have things just the way I like it.

Now they’ll have to factor that in to new product launches.

So beware! When you give customers endless flexibility, it takes away some of your options on the product development side.