Starbucked
Our excerpt from a new book about the coffee colossus.
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[November 7th, 2007]
In 2004, Taylor Clark had a close encounter with a mermaid.
After someone attempted a firebombing at a new Starbucks in Southeast Portland, Clark, then a staff writer for WW, wrote a cover story about the Seattle-based coffee giant, which has long featured the sea siren in its logo. In it, Clark examined the charges commonly lobbed at Starbucks and found some of them had scant grounds.
The article generated grande buzz—and not just in Portland. A few months after the article hit print, Clark got an email from a New York publishing house, planting the prospect of a book deal and an advance that would let him quit his job and devote his time to fleshing out the Starbucks story.
We haven’t seen anyone vanish so quickly since D.B. Cooper.
This week, the long-awaited Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (Little, Brown and Company, 304 pages, $25.99) hits bookstores. We are pleased to present this excerpt of Clark's book.
Starbucks didn’t invent coffee ; it just did something with it that no one thought possible. The company took a commodity that Americans could get for a quarter at carts and diners, reshaped it into a luxury product, convinced customers to buy it at hugely inflated prices, and built stores only a few blocks apart in every major city—yet patrons continue to line up in ever-greater numbers to fork over their money.
Starbucks now owns its market like few other companies in recent memory. Here’s a challenge: try to name the number two coffeehouse chain in America. Any ideas? The question is especially tough to answer because the company’s closest competitor, the Minnesota-based Caribou Coffee, is just one twenty-fifth the size of Starbucks. In fact, if you merged all of its rivals (that is, chains with more than three stores) into one patchwork coffee goliath, it still wouldn’t be even half the size of Starbucks. “It’s like McDonald’s with no Burger King or Wendy’s or Subway,” said Kevin Knox, a longtime Starbucks roasting expert who is now an industry consultant. “It’s total domination.”
With $7.8 billion in annual revenues, 40 million customers a week, and more than 14,000 stores, Starbucks is no passing fad. It’s a new American institution.
Actually, given the chain’s breakneck international expansion and its ability to reshape coffee-drinking habits the world over, Starbucks is more like a global institution. It’s no stretch to say that the company has changed the dynamics of the modern world. It influences automotive traffic patterns, affects the welfare of some 25 million coffee farmers, and sways the cultural customs of entire nations toward espresso consumption. It has inserted itself into the American urban landscape more quickly and craftily than any other retail company in history, and it has forever changed the way Western companies market themselves to consumers. Former Starbucks CEO Orin Smith, speaking to Fortune magazine, stated all of this even more boldly: “We changed the way people live their lives, what they do when they get up in the morning, how they reward themselves, and where they meet.”
Judging him solely by his autobiography, Pour Your Heart into It, and by his various public statements over the years, one can reach but a single conclusion about Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz: that he is the nicest, most warmhearted guy on the planet. In the book, Schultz relentlessly adorns his memories with inspirational platitudes; for instance, one chapter is titled, "Act Your Dreams with Open Eyes." He wants his company to "lead with its heart and nurture its soul" and asks, "Who wants a dream that's nearfetched?" Flipping through the pages, one almost starts believing that the whole Middle Eastern conflict could be cleared up in an hour if the leaders of Israel and Palestine would just grab a couple hazelnut lattes at the nearest Starbucks and share their feelings.
The sappiness is hardly surprising —CEOs today aren't exactly renowned for their soul-baring candor—but the sentimental bromides don't tell us much about how one actually builds a global coffee juggernaut. If you really want to get to know Schultz, try engaging in a friendly sporting contest with him. How about volleyball?
“Howard was so competitive,” said Dawn Pinaud, an early Starbucks employee. “I remember once we played volleyball at a company picnic and I missed the ball. Howard was so furious. I asked him, ‘Are you going to fire me because I missed the volleyball?’ He wouldn’t play again for two years because everybody made such a big deal out of how competitive he was. I’m surprised he hasn’t had a heart attack by now. He just loses it.”
Okay, maybe basketball?
“I formed an intra-company basketball team with Jim Reynolds, me, Gordon [Bowker], Jerry [Baldwin], Howard, all of those guys [who ran Starbucks in the ’80s], in some little gym on Capitol Hill,” recalled Chris Calkins, who managed Starbucks’ restaurant accounts. “Howard’s a hell of a guy, but he is the most aggressive guy I’ve ever played basketball with. I mean, he really showed his colors.” Put simply, Schultz despises losing. In a drawer of his old mahogany desk at home, he keeps dozens of newspaper and magazine clippings by those who have doubted Starbucks; he once told Fortune magazine, “Not a week goes by when I don’t look at those pieces.” Schultz has been known to call reporters at home and berate them after reading stories he disliked, and according to Dori Jones Yang, the co-author of his autobiography, he even named his first child, Jordan, after one of the most fiercely competitive athletes who ever lived: Michael Jordan.
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This drive to succeed made Schultz stick out in the tranquil Pacific Northwest. “I didn’t know what to make of Howard back then, to be honest,” said Joe Monaghan, a Seattle coffee-industry veteran. “He was aggressive, not at all like the typical person I was used to dealing with in the coffee industry—laid-back people who thought one or two stores would be plenty. Howard was always thinking bigger than that.”
The average Starbucks customer comes in 18 times a month, a rate Schultz claims makes the company "the most frequented retailer in the world." Just how good is Starbucks at winning over the hearts and wallets of its clientele? Consider the case of Tully's Coffee, a midsize chain that has made a policy of locating each of its stores as close to a Starbucks as possible, to capitalize on overflow customers and Starbucks' savvy real-estate machine. Tully's offers more or less the same drinks as its giant rival, its stores look very similar, and its freshly baked pastries are vastly better than those at Starbucks. On the surface, the two companies seem an awful lot alike. Yet the average Tully's brings in revenues of about $400,000 a year; the average Starbucks has over $1 million in revenue.
So why would Starbucks stores demolish the competition by such a wide margin? Price couldn’t have been a factor, since the chain generally charges more than its competitors. And it certainly isn’t due to the company’s advertising presence; between 1987 and 1997, Starbucks spent $10 million total on ads—an amount Coca-Cola blows through every two days. Maybe it was something about the coffee? “To be honest, you could train a monkey to pull a double shot,” said Scott Bedbury, a former Starbucks marketing director who also guided Nike’s legendary “Just Do It” campaign in the 1990s. “It’s just not that hard. The coffee wasn’t the hard part.”
If it wasn’t advertising, value, or even the main product that ensnared so many customers, then what was it? The secret behind Starbucks’ magnetic pull on consumers lies in the extraordinary amount of control it exercises over its image. At Starbucks, nothing is accidental. Everything the customer interacts with, from the obsessively monitored store environment down to the white paper cups, is the product of deliberation and psychological research. The coffeehouse as we know it is a calculated creation, tweaked and refined in large part by Schultz and his army of designers. In an age when homogenous ad campaigns cover every surface that can be bought, Starbucks chose a novel marketing approach: It transformed into an ad for itself. No longer would consumers just grab coffee; now they would come for the “Starbucks Experience.”
Schultz often insists that his company attained its current cachet almost by accident, just by being nice. "We never set out to build a brand," he wrote in Pour Your Heart into It. "Our goal was to build a great company, one that stood for something." In reality, however, Schultz had obsessed over the company's image since the beginning, supervising everything from the typefaces on coffee bags to the wording of phrases in company literature. "He signed off on everything—everything," Bedbury said. "Nothing went out without his approval."
Schultz considers himself the guardian of the Starbucks brand, and as such, he’s very careful about the ideas he associates with the company and its core product. For one, you’ll never see Starbucks drinks discounted in any way; Schultz wants you to view his product as the epitome of opulence, and would you ever see a “buy one, get one free” deal at a Jaguar dealership? On national issues, the company stakes out its positions with brand enhancement in mind. Its print ads usually “thank” customers for helping Starbucks provide some humanitarian service like tsunami relief funds, thereby aligning itself with the righteous cause in the consumer’s mind—in effect, making customers feel that buying a Starbucks latte is a form of global altruism.
Another area Starbucks has monitored with particular vigilance is its movie and television cameos. The company received cartloads of Hollywood scripts in the '90s, and in order for one to get authorization to use the siren logo, it had to reflect especially well on the brand. So when the director David Fincher approached the company with the screenplay for the Brad Pitt vehicle Fight Club and asked for permission to destroy a Starbucks with a wrecking ball-sized metal globe, the request got a thumbs-down. But a suggested scene for TV's Ally McBeal, wherein the title character and a costar would slowly and sensually savor their first sip of the day—as Bedbury put it, "Ally and her friend basically had oral sex with a Starbucks cup"—won enthusiastic approval.
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 The King of Caffeine: Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz. IMAGE: Sillygwailo from creativecommons.org |
In the cafés, on the other hand, Schultz was far less stingy with the company emblem. “It was all about the brand,” Harry Roberts, a longtime Starbucks marketing executive, told me. “We would put a dozen logos inside each store. They were everywhere.” The more logo sightings, the merrier. The cups in particular were devised with brand exposure in mind; Starbucks intended them to be handheld ads. “Over the years, we’ve had a lot of arguments about the design of the cups,” said Terry Heckler, who shaped the look of both the cups and the logo. “We agree now that the Starbucks cup is probably the most effective piece of media that Starbucks has. Lots of people have wanted to change the design, but Howard’s taken a strong stance on it. I mean, 40 million people a week—that’s a lot of billboards.”
The divergence in fortunes between coffee growers and coffee roasters over the last 20 years has been nothing less than staggering. In the late 1980s, as global coffee sales hovered at around $30 billion, farmers earned a steady $10 billion or so of the pie. The market has more than doubled since then—soaring to well over $70 billion on the strength of the designer coffee boom—yet according to the International Coffee Organization, growers have received an average of just $6.2 billion a year since the turn of the millennium.
The past few years have featured the lowest inflation-adjusted coffee prices in history—as low as 41.5 cents per pound, which is far below the growers’ cost of production—and the World Bank has estimated that 600,000 coffee workers are now out of work in Central America alone. In response to the terrible market conditions, farmers have undertaken desperate measures. In 2002, growers in Acapulco, Mexico, amassed an 8.4 million-pound hill of coffee beans—enough to brew more than 200 million cups of the stuff—and crushed it into fertilizer. The following spring, London’s Financial Times reported that the skies over vast areas of Guatemala were black with smoke from farmers torching their own coffee plantations. From Colombia to Ethiopia, farmers razed their coffee trees and replaced them with coca plants, opium poppies, and qat—a euphoria-inducing stimulant popular in Eastern Africa. When the cost of raising and harvesting a pound of beans far exceeds the market price, the coffee trees just aren’t worth keeping in the ground. If the farmers go hungry, their cash crop won’t help. You can’t eat coffee.
The great irony of it all is that this disastrous slump for growers has occurred in an era when coffee has enjoyed its highest profile in history, thanks to gourmet roasters like Starbucks. Many farmers find this discrepancy infuriating, even when they received a price deemed “fair” from companies that like to boast about their support of progressive causes. As one frustrated plantation owner put it in the journal World Coffee and Tea, “From the producer’s point of view, it seems truly ironic that a product that takes a year to grow, and that requires thousands of worker hours of difficult, delicate, and often dangerous work, should be so remarkably inflated by someone who simply cooks and displays the coffee.”
This brings us to an obvious question: If raw coffee is hovering around its all-time low price, why isn’t the slump making a dent in those big numbers on the coffeehouse menu board? Well, because what you’re paying for at a café isn’t the coffee. Take a four-dollar cappuccino, for example. According to statistics from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, only 5 percent of that price (20 cents) is the cost of the coffee itself—and that’s for roasted coffee, which the coffeehouse has already paid to cook, package, and ship. In reality, a nickel more than covers the farmer’s take for that cappuccino; that’s less than the cost of the cup, sleeve and lid (7 cents). At a coffeehouse like Starbucks, you’re paying for dairy products (10 percent, or 40 cents), labor and overhead (71 percent, or $2.84), and, of course, profit (11 percent, or 44 cents). Upping farmers’ rates significantly would cost the consumer virtually nothing—but since that’s not how the free market works, farmers are stuck struggling.
Whenever Starbucks announces plans to enter another thriving community, there's always a subset of alarmed locals who react as though the town were under siege from the Mongol horde. Yet even by these standards, the residents of the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood raised a considerable amount of hell when the company declared its intent to build a store there in the spring of 2004. As the liberal nerve center of the already hyperliberal city of Portland, the community has long been a tough sell for chains; shortly before the Starbucks revelation, the riled-up citizenry had scored a triumph over McDonald's, which had to scuttle its plans to open nearby because of strong resistance. Now, the locals were fighting Starbucks' occupation of a marquee space on a multipronged intersection known as Seven Corners. This did not fit with the pro-mom-and-pop neighborhood plan, and people let Starbucks know it in a flurry of protests and pickets. To say that relations between the company and its prospective customers were troubled would be putting it lightly. At one demonstration, a 9-year-old girl with a moss-green hat pulled over her ears took the microphone and announced that Starbucks was a "cancer."
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The conflict reached its climax one night that May—on the eve of the store’s scheduled debut—when a hooded and masked man, who was later given the folk-hero nom de guerre “The Nightworker,” made a last-ditch attempt to stop the Starbucks from opening: He tossed a Molotov cocktail at the store’s front windows.
When Starbucks first besieged Los Angeles in 1991, Herb Hyman was as alarmed as any local coffee-house owner would be. Though his successful Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf microchain had enjoyed a decades-long relationship with the Hollywood elite, Hyman worried that this juggernaut from Seattle would crush the business he had worked 30 years to build. Starbucks even promised as much. "They just flat-out said, 'If you don't sell out to us, we're going to surround your stores,'" Hyman recalled.
Soon after declining Starbucks’ buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was moving in next to one of his stores. Instead of panicking, as many have done, Hyman called his friend Jim Stewart of Seattle’s Best Coffee, who had plenty of experience competing with Schultz. He asked Stewart what really happened when Starbucks built a store nearby. “You’re going to love it,” Stewart replied. “They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.” His prediction proved correct. Each new Starbucks created its own buzz, drawing out people who had never strayed from Folgers to try a latte: After they were hooked, these converts started exploring other coffee houses, and it just so happened that there was another one right across the street. The increased attention to coffee immediately boosted Hyman’s sales. “I told my people to get real estate wherever Starbucks went—it didn’t matter how much it cost,” he told me.
Here’s a statistic that might be surprising, given the dominance of the Starbucks empire: According to SCAA figures, 57 percent of the coffee houses in America are mom and pops.
Even between 2000 and 2005, long after the ascendance of Starbucks, the number of independent coffeehouses in the United States increased more than 40 percent—from 9,800 to just under 14,000. Starbucks’ share of the market keeps inching upward (over the same period, it tripled its U.S. store count, from 2,700 to 7,500), but the proliferation of its stores hasn’t fa zed the mom and pops at all—quite the opposite. The failure rate for new coffee houses is incredibly low—only 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel—which means a sizable majority of the independents stay in business regardless of where Starbucks drops its stores.
“This isn’t like the restaurant business, where the vast majority fail,” explained Dawn Pinaud, the early Starbucks employee. “Very rarely does Starbucks ever put people out of business.”
The Java Jolt
Though we often don’t perceive it as such, caffeine is a drug. With 90 percent of Americans taking some form of it habitually, caffeine has become so commonplace in society that food and beverage manufacturers often don’t bother to inform consumers if it’s present in a product. But it’s there, far more frequently than we realize. Here’s an example: We all know that soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Barq’s Root Beer contain enough caffeine to give us a decent jolt, but who would have guessed that Sunkist—an orange soda—has more of it than either of those two? Caffeine isn’t some naturally occurring part of the soda-manufacturing process, nor does it have any noticeable flavor; it’s always an additive, mixed in by beverage companies specifically for its pharmacological effects. What’s more, fully 70 percent of American soft drinks contain it—a fact that has helped make caffeine the most widely used psychoactive drug on the planet.
Which, depending on your opinions about the issue, would make Starbucks the world’s biggest pusher. The stakes are high for Starbucks in the caffeine debate. Several former and current Starbucks executives told me that they could imagine only one thing that might bring Starbucks down: conclusive scientific evidence that caffeine is unhealthy. If that were to happen, the company would bear a heavy burden; thanks to Starbucks, we’re taking in more caffeine than ever. The company serves the most potent brew in the coffee-house world, which, on a strong day, packs nearly as much caffeine in a single grande cup as three maximum-strength NoDoz caplets. And since Starbucks brought coffee back into vogue, we’ve become surrounded with caffeinated “energy drinks” like Red Bull, caffeinated breath mints, caffeinated vodka...the list goes on. —TC
The author says "For one, you’ll never see Starbucks drinks discounted in any way". I specifically recall around 1999 having some sort of coupon for a free or buy one/get one free iced frappucino that I used at the Starbucks at 36th and Hawthorne. It was really good for free. But $4 for one? Sorry, I am not a zombie even though I am a capitalist of the Ayn Rand ilk. It is a marketing scam but the scam is possible because the average American is braindead.
Starbucks trumped the competition and not everyone is happy? Who misses coffee that tasted like Styrofoam from cups that eventually melted in your hand; cups that had the cover with the peel back opener that looked like a basement door in the floor and spilled with every breath you took? The package alone tainted even the best coffee around.
Maybe Starbucks was cool when you couldn't get it everywhere, when you had to go out of your way to find it. In the beginning Starbucks was like Coors Beer when you had to go out of state for a six-pack
I discovered Starbucks in the food court that has since turned into the Columbia Sport store on Broadway. It was coffee you couldn't see through, as if that mattered, and it did. It was coffee unlike my Grandpa's that he boiled in a pan and hit with cold water before serving to sink the grounds. Gramps liked to drink his style coffee all day, saying it looked sort of like coffee and tasted sort of like coffee, which was close enough for him. It was more like tea. Back then a cup of Starbucks coffee was seventy five cents and tasted like a huge espresso, which seemed like a great deal.
Is Starbucks evil for making a decent cup of coffee? I drank Chockful-O-Nuts coffee from a company store when I lived in NYC in the seventies. Nothing matched it until Starbucks arrived in Portland. If Starbucks is evil for making their coffee, is Honda evil for making a car? A motorcycle company in the auto field? It would never work, and the early Honda Civic proved it. Then Honda made changes, like Toyota before it, and now you can buy a car with a long life expectancy without the obvious built-in obsolescence.
Is Nike evil for becoming the biggest sports apparel company in the world? Like Starbucks, they could take their company anywhere in the world and build headquarters. Halliburton moved to Dubai, but the Northwest companies stayed home instead, to their credit. It doesn't mean we get free coffee, or a pass for the Nike employee's store, but we do get a sense of regional loyalty.
How pervasive is Starbucks? I traveled the south of England one summer and couldn't find a to-go cup, let alone a Starbucks. If I wanted decent coffee I had to sit down for a double Sanka. Order a milkshake there and you got a glass of milk with a scoop of ice-cream, so why would I expect a cup of real coffee in the land of tea? What I didn't expect was finding a Starbucks in the middle of Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon. When I did I turned ugly-American and left my car in the middle of the road to run in for a Vente. I saved the cup, pouring double Sanka into it until I got home. I didn’t pay the ticket either so I can’t go back, and I won’t until there’s a coffeehouse in Swanage.
Spring 2004 was the time when I joined several Portlanders in sticking it to the anarchist thugs in this town. That was when the Starbucks on 21st & Division had just been firebombed right before its grand opening. I vowed to stick it to the anarchists the best way I knew how - by making that Starbucks one of my regular stops while on my afternoon break. The anarchists then disappeared. We are still here. Take that, Red & Black Cafe. Nyahh.
Awesome. You are now my new personal Hero.
Dork-you mean the one where nobody goes except cops and people who wear polyester pull on pants? Wow-You da man!
The thing that made me mad about the article was that it failed to mention that most of the neighbors were fine with a Starbucks going in on Division and some of us really happy about it. Did that get focused on? NO. I confronted some of the protesters who were saying 'nobody wants this Starbucks' to a reporter and I told them that was a lie, I wanted it. I asked them if they even really lived in the neighborhood or owned property and guess what .....they did not. The people who kept us regular folks out of the Red and Black did not want us to get our coffee somewhere else....I guess. Starbucks also has really great benefits for their employees, that did not get mentioned either. Why do these people hate successes?
(A global denomination corporate coffee brand with an astrology and a type of deer combined name based in Seattle with a siren on the logo, and with lawyers with superhuman powers that shall get no mention for advertisement, otherwise shall remain unspeakable) is like a freakin' fire hydrant. There's one on every flippin' corner.
Thank you very much for, in your reprint of the excerpt from Starbucked, including the statements about how much of the price of the coffee actually goes to the coffee grower.
For some of your readers, coffee growers have a personal face.
For many years, Frank Gorsline and the ministry he has here in the Northwest with the Christian missionary agency called OMS International, has sent groups of people to Brazil for short term periods to visit and experience life with Christian missionaries.
(Many of these visitors to the missionaries in Brazil have been college students at George Fox University or Seattle Pacific University, but a large number have come from local churches as well.)
As often as possible, as part of their trip those groups get a chance to visit a coffee plantation that is a five minute drive from the church affiliated camp where the groups of visitors stay. Over the course of the years, I would imagine that Frank has been responsible for several thousand Pacific Northwesterners visiting a real coffee plantation, sometimes picking coffee berries from bushes, sorting coffee from the leaves that wind up with the coffee, turning and drying the coffee while at the same time protecting it from rain (this affair that must be done in direct sun for the coffee to be worth selling, and is at least a three day process after it has been picked), and packing the stuff in 50 kilogram bags for sale and export.
Because the farmers are share croppers, they get a portion of what the crop sales earn. Coffee has a two year cycle, where there is a good year and a bad year. Generally, they make below Brazilian minimum wage (which does not apply to share crop farmers) but during the "off" year of the coffee plant they have to survive on as little as $1,000 for the year.
Thanks to publicly subsidized health care, the coffee farmers at least don't have to completely pay for their medical procedures, which can be fairly substantial when those 50 kilogram bags start to add up over several decades. Also thanks to the socialist government safe drinking water and sewage treatment is slowly making its way into the Brazilian rural areas.
Of course, you can't blame Starbucks for that whole situation: coffee is sold on a woldwide market. Most of the coffee from the plantation we visit supposedly goes to Europe, and somehow I imagine the stuff being consumed in tiny high end coffee houses in Paris at twice the price Starbucks sells the stuff for.
Without consumers demanding a change to industry practices things will probably not change too much.
Dave, good on you!!! Your comment was well written and a pleasure to read. Unlike some, who can't be bothered to actually read the article -- or even skim it -- in order to make a coherent argument. But, can only throw out short idiotic "agree with me!!!" statements.
That said -- I have to admit, when I lived in Portland, I avoided Starbucks and even joined in on the immature name-calling.
Then.... one day, I (not like so many "I can't leave my scene"-sters) decided to spend six months travelling the States. It wasn't until Tennessee that I really began craving a latte. I realized how presumptuous and "sub-culturecentric" I was when at a gas station in I-don't- know-where, Tennessee; I asked the attendant where the closest coffeehouse was. He looked at me funny and told me there was a restaurant down the road. (Restaurant = Dave's gramp's coffee.) I said I didn't want to go to a restaurant. I just wanted coffee. So, I asked again. "Where can I just get coffee?" Again, he looked at me like I lacked a basic education and pointed to the coffee machine in the service station. It became perfectly clear to me that I wasn't in the NW anymore! I quickly devised a "where to get good coffee" strategy, which resulted in many a visit to Barnes & Noble, all across the USA, where I resigned to drinking the one and only, it's-so-cool-to-hate, STARBUCKS!!! AND I LOVED IT!!!
Then, two years ago, I moved to crapville, Europe. Coincidentally, the very month I arrived, so did Starbucks. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't stand it. I refused to support corporate-America's invasion. Ironically... I soon realized that the only place I was going to be able to get a soy-latte was from a company that services vegetarians/vegans, because vegetarianism/veganism is "normal" in Seattle and freaking weird in Europe!!! Again, I found myself taking a long, savoring draw from a delicious cup of high-priced STARBUCKS coffee. I have been a happy, thankful, and loyal customer for the past two years.
A little fuel for the hater fire: Since 2005, five *$ have gone up in this city. I have to admit; I thought that was excessive. But, they are full!!! Full of Anti-American Euro-hypocrites.
{BTW - for all of you who threatened to leave the country if Bush was elected again... I dare you. Europe, shmurope. And, NO, I'm not in the military. I just get the feeling you were all talk, and have never travelled.}
"We hate it when our friends become successful."
Re: Eurpoe -> You MUST be living in the UK. The continent (north of the alps) IS all it's cracked up to be. Or maybe you're THAT kind of expat...
Get a clue folks: Starbucks coffee isn't that good. Just like the over-hopped IPAs (that's right, I said it!) that Norwesterners seem to love, the coffee is bitter and over flavoured. Here's how you can tell: how many people order non-sugar induced drinks? If their coffee was so good, people wouldn't need the added caramel, whipped cream, mocha, frappa, crappa whatever.
All the friggen expats here in England rave about their Shitbucks like it's sliced bread. It's not even about the coffee, it is the experience as Schultz says. And it's a crap experience. Watch Fight Club again folks, it'll do you some good.
Support local companies because they actually put money back into your community. Starbucks profits are shipped back to Seattle and packed into Schultz's yacht.
What kind of Expat playes the "flavour" card? It colours the whole argument, though without caps because Pattie can't write since she learned to pronounce alumineeum correctly.
Are you that kind of expat, the kind who orders a fried toomahtoe with their fried bread, getting lubed up on enough grease so you'll have an excuse to avoid the sausage proudly made with the best floor scraps available? Memo to Pat: the hair and dirt in the sausage are not accidents, it's part of the gastro-experience you crave.
No, you won't find landfill sausage in a cup of Starbuck coffee, the bitter nectar squeezed from the top left corner of your former country. You need sugar? Living in England, you know sugar is king. Sugar on steak; sugar on fish and chips; sugar in Sanka. Just be sure you brush your grill or you'll visit home with the laminated layers of dental material peeling off the stubs that used to be teeth. If you don't mind a smile that resembles wet plywood, then you are that kind of expat.
Since you slam coffee, the modern standard of coffee this side of a cup of Chock-Full-O-Nuts coffee from the company store in Manhattan c.1979, why even mention beer? Honey, you apparently drink English beer, and like it. What happened, did you run out of vintage Olympia? Remember Olympia Beer? They said it was the water. They knew it was the water, yet did nothing about it. Or are you finally out of Blitz beer? You moved to England after your final night on the town in Portland? Since you are a cultoured individual and enjoy the finer aspects of what used to be your city, you had to move after your last episode of the Blitz shitz at the Schnitz?
Since we know the difference between coffee and a cup of Kenco strained through a Yorkies bed liner; and the difference between beer and the fermented sweat wrung from a hooligan's Man-U jersey mixed with spilled Stella, we will have to suffour in our ignourance.
PS: I'll have a vente with room.
Cheerio
Actually, Expat, thankfully I don't live in the UK (a wee ISLAND, yes roughly above the Alps, but you must have forgotten about the other countries that you'd have to pass through PLUS the tunnel should you so choose, to get to the Queen's land! Oh, that's right, it is normal to think the UK is the Only --- so strange --- I just don't get that), but do work with a lot of Brits. I won't even get started on a culture bash, although I will say it would be quite easy --
OH, one question. Where can I get the European issued "This is How You are Meant to Think, and Please Don't Think For Yourself" manual? Apparently, everyone's been conditioned to have the same old-fashioned opinion.
I'll have a Ghandi Latte Please. Personally, there is no better way to start the day than filling up my tub with a scalding hot dego-venti semi-double-half cap frappa-mocha-latte-Carolina-Steamroller and diving in. "Starbucks" more like "Fucking- awesomeville". hyper-hyphen-caffenated. On my walks throughout the town I enjoy strolling into Stumptown and dumping delicious Maquiladora-blend Starbucks into their pretentious self serve dispensers. Then I wait to hear the gentle hipsters swoon about how much better this coffee is than the Starbucks in their native Des Moines or up-state New York.
What a great laugh I have seeing all those poor drug addicts lining up each day for their "fix." The only reason it costs so much is because all the addicts haven't realized that they don't have the guts to say no to the ridiculous prices charged for a cup of dirty brown bean water...they gotta have that java!
As for the logo...someone said it was a two-tailed mermaid. I've always thought of it as a coffee addict with two guns pointed to their head. (Drink our swill or the coffee addict gets it!) Bwah hah hah!
Starbucks is no less evil than any other company that caters to the public's desires. This book present some facts that dismiss a lot of the negative hype that has been thrown at Starbucks.
I remember the original article, and its quoted research. With all the complaints about monopoly, it was refreshing to see the facts: that before starbucks, there were just a handful of coffee shops in the portland phone book - after starbucks arrived (at the time of the article) there were hundreds. Starbucks may not fit you or your neighborhood, but the cafe culture they championed in America has made many businesses reap the rewards. You don't like 'em? open your own coffee shops. I'll be there!
For the past three years the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW. Yes, THAT IWW) has been organizing Starbucks, shop by shop. The NLRB in NY found the company guilty of 37 violations of the law in one case alone,and the Union has won some important victories over this behemoth. So far there are IWW shops in NY, Chicago, Seattle, the SF Bay area and LA. Additionally, organizing drives are on in other cities, and the British branch has organized Starbucks baristas in London and Glasgow so far. At their convention in Paris last summer, the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) of both Spain and France voted to organize Starbucks in their countries as well in solidarity with the IWW. Starbucks has been actively engaged in union busting and shows itsself as the exploiter it is. Read about the baristas' struggle for a living wage, affordable benefits, consistent scheduling, and dignity at www.starbucksunion.org
For the past three years the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW. Yes, THAT IWW) has been organizing Starbucks, shop by shop. The NLRB in NY found the company guilty of 37 violations of the law in one case alone,and the Union has won some important victories over this behemoth. So far there are IWW shops in NY, Chicago, Seattle, the SF Bay area and LA. Additionally, organizing drives are on in other cities, and the British branch has organized Starbucks baristas in London and Glasgow so far. At their convention in Paris last summer, the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) of both Spain and France voted to organize Starbucks in their countries as well in solidarity with the IWW. Starbucks has been actively engaged in union busting and shows itsself as the exploiter it is. Read about the baristas' struggle for a living wage, affordable benefits, consistent scheduling, and dignity at www.starbucksunion.org
Cosh..... you are insane.
Crazy old Cosh make the print version of WW. That's not insane, is it? Way to go Cosh.
Organizing a union and having it be recognized are quite different things. It is a losing argument to claim workers at Starbucks are 'oppressed' because their pay and benefits are better than most in retail. An argument can be made that all workers deserve independent representation. But, the Wobblies' false claims about Starbucks costs the union credibility.
Ms Gomez: What false claims?
Don't take my word for it. Go to: www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflas...
Starbucks has settled a court case in Michigan, and is currently on trial in NYC for labor violations. WalMart has more workers covered by healthcare than Starbucks, which covers only 40.9% of it's workers (their figure). What is the source of yr info that 'their pay and benefits are better..'? The IWW doesn't need 'recognition' to win victories. It needs only the solidarity of the workers it represents.
Ms Gomez: What false claims?
Don't take my word for it. Go to: www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflas...
Starbucks has settled a court case in Michigan, and is currently on trial in NYC for labor violations. WalMart has more workers covered by healthcare than Starbucks, which covers only 40.9% of it's workers (their figure). What is the source of yr info that 'their pay and benefits are better..'? The IWW doesn't need 'recognition' to win victories. It needs only the solidarity of the workers it represents.
Check out the perspective of some employees who are less than satisfied with the "great benefits" that Starbucks "gives" to its employees:
Too bad less than 41% of Starbucks employees actually even get to purchase the company's paltry health plan! (by comparison, Walmart is approx. 47%)
GO UNION!!!
Starbucks offers affordable health, dental, and vision insurance to employees who work an average of 20 hours a week, along with disability benefits, stock options, a matched 401K, paid vacation time, paid personal days, competitive wages, and more. If 60% of employees are not insured, it is because they elect not to be covered, or choose to work fewer than 20 hours a week. Most managers are motivated to make sure any employee who wants to work enough to get insurance gets their 20 hours. Additionally, if one finds themselves not getting enough hours for some reason, they are free to contact any other Starbucks in the area to cover shifts in order to get the 20 hours they need.
Hey, I think quality coffee is great, nothing wrong with that.
But why would anyone think having 14,000 stores around the world all being exactly the same be a good thing? Do we want everything in our life to be this way? What would life be like that way?
When our economy sinks into the Greater Depression and the middle class is completely gone from the USA, will people even remember what it was like to walk into a local shop and to know and do business directly with the owner?
"Starbucked" is the book I've been waiting to read for years. I am proud to say that I have probably bought Starbuck's coffee only half a dozen times in the last two decades. In the same vein as Nike's founder Phil Knight, Starbucks founder Howard Schulz would have you believe that his company is selling so much more than just coffee--they are selling hope, inspiration, faith, courage, the vehicle to lift wretched souls out of their poverty and misery, whatever. In reality, they are just hawking overpriced coffee and overpriced coffee accoutrements to people who have no value for a dollar. And if people really wanted to do something for the misfortunate in our society, they would put their latte money in a cookie jar and see how much accumulated at the end of a year. It would probably be enough to feed or clothe the impoverished of our community for months!
Like many Portlanders, one of my first jobs was with Starbucks twenty years ago. What amazes me is how that now Starbucks does EVERYTHING they "taught" us that the company would NEVER EVER DO to cheapen their product: i.e., drive-through windows, franchises, etc. With same store sales down for the first time in company history this quarter, one wonders if the party is coming to an end.
As a director for a non-profit in Oregon, it is my duty as a volunteer to seek food contributions. On two separate dates at two different Starbucks I was told:"...(12/01/07 5:30PM 11th & SW Alder) that the pastries would be in the dumpster at day end and we could eat out of it it like everyone else.." and "...(12/24/07 10:00AM 2nd & SW Taylor) come back at 7:00PM and pick them up..." then "...(12/24/07 6:30PM) we closed early and you're too late, we threw them all away...go away, we're closed..."
We went on to serve almost 1000 guests on Christmas Day and served pastries donated by many real humanitarians that peddle coffee, too. So much for Starbucks CSR's (community social responsibilities) and their corporate image. HG'08
In veiwing your article title, I could not help but think, "Starfucked". I, personnaly, have always referred to the company as "Wal-Bucks".