Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren't easy to invoke.
I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.
FWIW, here is the US, the ground wire is often completely exposed. As in, no colored jacket, just the bare copper throughout the entire run. Attached to ground at the breaker box, and attached to any grounding ports or metal boxes throughout the building.
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.
Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn't tracked anywhere that I know of
Uber's insurance is pretty bad. Many get the additional coverage from their regular insurer anyway because of this. That coverage also (usually) applies to this situation as well.
How close are these surrounding towns? What's the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?
Often, it's not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that's quiet and boring. It doesn't make much sense for anyone to move there if they don't.
Timing and pacing are inherently different when there's a laugh track. You can't just silence the laughter or cut the time range. In some cases, you have to rework the joke.
The audience usually attends for free ("for free tickets to the _____ show, call...."), but there's still a lot of overhead. Not only do you need ushers, security, and so on, you need to be filming on a sound stage with a place for the audience.
On the flip side, laugh tracks are easily added in post.
If the locals - as a whole, not just some prominent extremists - dislike Starbucks being there, then the location will fail.
To add to this, imagine the reverse. Can you imagine if they passed up better opportunities, just so that it could happen on a specific date on the calendar?
Sounds absurd, right?
"handle" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as "safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control". Which isn't a small task in itself, but it's a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.
I think you're approaching the wrong aspect. While that could be a scam where a man is impersonating a woman, there are plenty where it's actually a woman running the scam. There are plenty of red flags here, and those don't change.
The problem is that I'm sure your friend is aware of those red flags. He's also choosing to ignore them. I suspect he doesn't do well with women IRL, and this at least gives him hope.
Assuming that's all true, this is way above the pay grade of random people on the Internet.
Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It's clearly not an experience that people flock to.
OTOH, on the rare occasion I've visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.