Personally, I don't care for their coffee. It always tastes very bitter, like it's been on the warmers for days.

Give me locally roasted Spot Coffee anyday. Hell, give me one of those fancy gas stations where they have ten kinds of flavors and the fancy creamers. mmm...

Yeesh, LT. Well, I'm glad you're free of that place. I'm sorry you had to go through such hell while you were there. Onwards, upwards, etc! In any event...

I really never go to Starbucks, so you can count on me to resist partaking.

And, oops, I think this is the link you were lookin' for.

Yes, that's the one: www.batdorf.com

Bookmark it!

I've been a starbucks like 3 or 4 times total. Why the fuck would I pay 5 bucks for a cup of coffee?

And don't forget-tip jars at the drivethru...what noive.

So, anybody else out there make a decent frappucino?

just get some Italian syrup and make your own, Bunnyfire!

I guess part of my point with this is, one of the things you hear the most at Sbux Corp is the phrase "everywhere", or "everyone", this kind of verbiage.

What is to become of us as a people or as individuals when businesses try to equate the idea of ubiquity (i.e. "everywhere", "everyone"-ness) with something you can buy?

Make your own decisions! Notice and share things that only YOU like! Be idiosyncratic and obtuse - why wait for a huge company to feed you/clothe you/tell you what to eat, watch, listen to and drink!

GET YOUR OWN FREAK ON!

Sorry, I live in fly-over country and Starbucks is the only real coffee in town. I get a cup of the house blend for 25 cents if I bring in a college mug. And my daughter is working for Starbucks in Massachusetts and she loves it.

"Piss Off! Starbucks," is what I say! They're opening THREE more in my town alone, by the end of the year. They just take over everything. Place gives me the creeps. Won't go near their Kool-Aid. No sir.

Larry C? What is fly-over country? The middle of America? I've never heard that term before.

You can order online from batdorf and they mail you stuff.

Glad your daughter is digging working there. I myself will never in my life buy anything from Starbucks again. I don't want to promote what they do.

It's not just about good coffee, Larry, it's about ONE SINGLE COMPANY PROMOTING THEMSELVES AS AN ANSWER TO YOUR CULTURAL NEEDS. They want to give you music, food, drinks, clothes, movies, etc. Starbucks does.

Sorry, no thanks. I'd rather take the extra step and decide to support local people doing smaller things.

Anyone with a computer can get better coffee than Starbucks. There are record stores both online and in your town who could be getting your dollars. Movie houses run by people who love movies, not by teenagers and conglomerate chains.

I want to feel connected to where I live and what goes on, not feel like I can get Product A anywhere in the country. I'd rather go to your Flyovertown, USA and find some little restaurant or greasy spoon and buy Acrid Blend #2 and feel like I knew the place rather than go to a Starbucks and have some impersonal, safe, "been-there-done-that" autopilot feeling and pay 2 dollars for drip!

I stopped going to Starbucks long ago for the simple reason that their coffee sucks and is overpriced.

I'm in (for continuing my "boycot").

Yeah, even when there's nothing else available, I'll just forgo (or get a can of pop from a vending machine instead).

Not to defend Starbucks, but how is their behavior different from any other major corporation? If you're going to talk boycott, make it about the whole system of multinational vs. local food politics, not just one corporation that happened to take advantage of the trust that you were fully willing at first to give them.

Thank you to everyone who's reading and/or commenting on this thread. This is obviously a large issue for me, and Starbucks is just a catalyst for dormant ideas I've had previously.

What also makes me think about Larger Issues is this idea of "good coffee" period? I mean, A. How much of your day is spent on needing good vs. bad coffee? and B. If Starbucks invented it, fine, so the story goes. But there's Peet's and Batdorf's, and all sorts of coffeeplaces that exist online that make better coffee in smaller amounts.

It's about what you think about how you treat yourself and the world. About who is telling you what about your life and your choices. What is important to you about yourself and the world?

Anyway, I'll stop now. Great thread, though, keep it up, get into it with me, people!

Totally! Mats - you're right. It's not just Sbux, it's the whole trip behind it. Believe me, when I first worked there, I bought the shit wholesale, I believed it. But as the weeks rolled on, you see what actually is happening, and what it means in a larger context.

Which for me is "What do you become when the need to not-think about your world becomes preferable over having someone else in an office somewhere do it for you and make it even seem smart to do so?"

This isn't anything new for any of us, I'm just marinating in a very public and disturbing example of it seen from the inside. I feel sorry for the people I left behind in my department, because they're totally locked into it. I, poor as I am, have the freedom to walk away and learn something bedrock about myself in the process.

Is it possible to boycott a place you never go or have any intention of going?

'cause if it is, hey, count me in. Totally.

I guess I'm just not seeing the overt "badness" in Starbucks' business practices. Branding a concept, i.e., ubiquity, just makes good business sense. You want your product associated with a concept like that.

When choosing to buy a product, I usually look at three things: the quality of the product, the cost and the convenience. Starbucks product is adequate. It costs about the same as comparable products from other companies. It's there when I need it. If there's another coffee shop closer, and their service is as efficient or better, I'll go there. However, I'm not about to put myself to inconvenience in order to punish an organization for recognizing and implementing a sucessful market strateg. So long as they're not mistreating employees or behaving in an anticompetitive way, I'll continue to buy their stuff when it happens to be convenient.

I don't think it's plausible to assert that Starbucks' presence is harmful to independant busineses; this has been shown to be false. In fact, the growth of the market for boutique coffee has been driven by Starbucks, and has actually created a market niche in which new independant businesses can flourish. What Starbucks' market strategy seems to entail is the merchandising of the experience of shopping at their outlets. Thus, they are expanding the depth of their market without having to move any more of their core product (coffee). I think it's a great idea - wish I'd thought of it.

Personally, if I had a choice between a locally-owned coffee shop (particularly one that advertised Fair Trade coffee) and a Starbucks, I'd go to the locally-owned place every time. This isn't much of an issue for me though, because I don't drink much coffee. But, for the record, I think it's worth noting thay Starbucks was the first American coffee company to adopt a corporate code of conduct to protect coffee plantation workers in South America from unsafe work conditions, to protect their freedom to unionize, and to ensure that they receive fair wages. Granted, they implemented the code of conduct under a great deal of consumer pressure, and they haven't done a really good job of self-enforcement. However, they did set an example to other American coffee companies (Sara Lee's coffee division, Procter & Gamble's Millstone brand) to implement coffee workers' rights initiatives, and I think that was valuable.

Fine, Pie, absolutely. What you have also said is one of the most cynical things to say (in my opinion ONLY) about what I'm bringing up here.

I believe it is bad to make people mentally associate an "experience" with a ubiquitous company. I believe it is wrong to make people believe that this "experience" is available to them anywhere without having to think about it on a conscious level.

And I especially DO NOT believe that equating how you think about what you eat/drink/watch/wear in this way is something to commend a company for, or compare it to "sound business sense".

Pie, we disagree. There's something utterly disingeneous and cynical about this for me that makes me write threads like this, and I appreciate your part in it.

Whether it's wrong or not, I don't know, but I don't think marketing an "experience" that goes beyond coffee will be a successful strategy in the long-run. I have no desire to consume anything besides coffee and the associated food in a Starbucks. Sometimes it is a convenient meeting place too. But I have no desire to buy music or anything else from them.

Of course, I have no marketing data to back me up, but if this were an investment coming across my desk I'd dismiss it out-of-hand. It just doesn't sound plausible. What it sounds like is a spiffy idea from an over-confident marketing department and a way to blow a lot money.

You have to remember that SBUX is a public company that has to demonstrate growth quarterly. Nevermind that the stores have mostly saturated the US - shareholders demand 10%+ annual stock price appreciation. At some point, companies like SBUX have to start coming up with wacky growth ideas or face the prospect of becoming a slow growth company.

May I ask... What is the Starbucks "experience", exactly? I've never laid eyes on a Starbucks, and I don't know what the deal is there. Do people mostly use it to pick up coffee to take with them, or do they meet friends there to sit around and talk? Both? I don't really "get" it, I guess.

There are three cafes (I'm not talking about food places) just on my short block alone - just my side of the block; they all have indoor and outdoor seating and expensive (about the same price as SB), fancy coffee. I just don't really understand why it comes down to, like, one place in the U.S.

LT, I'm already in. As you know, I live in a very Italian neigbourhood. The cafe owners here were interviewed by a news crew when the first Starbucks opened. When asked if they were worried, they laughed. "Keeps the yuppies out of our store," they said. "People who want a real cappuccino will still come to us." And they do. Also I find Sbux regular coffee completely undrinkable. My understanding is that they over-roast their beans, which raises the caffeine level but makes the coffee quite bitter.

On preview: taz, part of what they do in North America is over-saturate the local market, putting stores every block or so, sometimes 2 on an intersection. Because of brand identification (and the ability to rent space on more walked-by corners) they eventually put a lot of local cafes out of business, leaving them as the only coffee option for blocks around.

If you'd like to support local/sustainable/organic/traditional, etc., let me tell you about Slow Food International and Slow Food USA. If there's not a convivium near you, you can start one. I just did, with a small group of Core Founders. It's awesome. Political and delicious!

I'm all for boycotting Starbucks because it's bad coffee, and because Languagehat is not here, I can say it without having to amass my evidence. What it comes down to is that nontasters and tasters can tolerate it, supertasters hate it. Coffee experts rate it pretty low.

Like it or not, LT, "lifestyle marketing" is the name of the game these days. Anyone who doesn't jump on that band wagon is just shooting themselves in the foot. This is the reality of how all sucessfull brands manage their market share, from home and garden stores to real estate products.

The reason for this is increased competition for consumer dollars. There is an unprecedented ammount of affluence in the market today, and in order to capture those dollars, companies have to offer more and more to differentiate themselves in a jam-packed market. For one thing, this has meant a general trend of moving stores and product lines upscale. For example, have you noticed that the overall "experience" of shopping at Safeway is qualitatively different today from what it was in the 80's? Artsy interiors with fancy lighting, sushi bufets and more. Safeway is even rolling out an organics line of store brand products, in an effort to win back market share lost to more upscale retailers like Whole Foods.

Simultaneously, in the real estate world, where I work, the trend is toward building what's known as lifestyle centers. These are outdoor shopping complexes with a small town downtown appearance. One parks and strolls from store to store - I'm sure you have these in Seattle. The brand mix is carefully tailored to the demographics of the neighborhood and empahsizes complimentary goods associated with a certain desirable lifestyle, hence the term "lifestyle center."

There's nothing intrinsically disingenuous about doing whatever you can to stand out amongst your competitors. Lifestyle marketing simply uses observations about consumer psychology to package what they're doing on their own anyway.

I have no illusions about why I prefer some things to others. I'm going to Banana Republic tomorrow to get some new pants, partly because their upscale casual aesthetic blends nicely with my image of the products I want to have around me in terms of clothing and furniture, etc. Also, I like the experience of being in their nice, airy two story store in downtown. Sometimes I just go there with the explicit purpose of buying something I don't need because I know it will make me feel good. This is the world that I live in. I think I might as well enjoy it.

Well, I'm getting kind of afraid now. I've been reading up on Starbucks, and it turns out they now have a couple of places in Athens (which one article describes as "bringing coal to Newcastle"), and aren't doing badly in Paris, evidently. Knock me over with a feather. Someone even has a Starbucks Gossip blog.

Anyway, in the surfing around, I found a special image for LT:

≡ Click to see image ≡

"Sometimes I just go there with the explicit purpose of buying something I don't need because I know it will make me feel good."

What does this mean pieisexactlythree? I don't get why buying something you don't need makes you feel good. I am constantly fighting to get rid of stuff I don't need. Why would you buy it?

pie...just...wow.

There's no point telling Starbucks to fuck off. Tell that to all the people who choose to purchase their products. You can't just blame them for being sucessfull. That's disingenuous.

arse, it's the thrill of the hunt. And besides, clothes that you're bored with are easily disposed of. Either to friends or just dumped at Goodwill. They accept my old shit at no charge. Pretty great, huh?

pie I honestly don't get it. Not trying to be snarky. I just don't understand. How is buying things from a store a hunt? Why do you what something you don't need?

As for SB I generally avoid them because I don't buy much coffee, they are pricier than anywhere else, the coffee never tastes the way I like it and the tip jars so many of them have.

There's a certain satisfaction when you find just the right pair of shoes. I mean, you walk around, from shop to shop, (all the while doing some serious people-watching). Then you find THE ONE. You put them on and you just know that thse are the shoes. Also, high end retailers are just nice places to be in. They're designed to be. I like being in aesthitically pleasing surroundings.

For me, it's a decision to protest (I guess) this notion that "taking over the world" has any value. I've heard the CEO of SB speak and, for me, his desire\philosophy to homogenize the coffee "experience" all over the world is what's wrong with so much of what's going on in the world.

Will this little choice of mine make a difference? Not likely. Deep down I believe humanity is boned and that there are too many “asleep” people to ever really make the kind of value change necessary to ensure that hunger and hopelessness no longer takes a back seat to the free market.

Anyway, that's my personal take. :)

I agree "aesthitically pleasing surroundings" are good but I will disagree that most "high end retailers" are nice places to be in. I find things like lifestyle centers boringly the same. No fun at all.

Still, they beat the hell out of Walmart.

Related to elizard's comments about oversaturation, there is a kind of amazing Kottke post about "Maximum Starbucks Density" ("Put your address into the Starbucks locator and see what your Starbucks density is"). One of the early comments counts 170 around the Broadway 10010 area, so I just checked it again, and it's up to 184.

Yeah, I pretty much avoid suburban shopping centers. Downtown, we have the gammut from hole in the wall record stores to Sacks Fifth Avenue. Mostly, if you were to tally up my purchases, it would be at small independants. That is because I live in the city, and that happens to be what is most convenient. Also in Portland, independant retailers usually go the extra mile to produce a positive experience for the consumer. My local coffee shop is more tailored to my preferences because of the intimate knowlege the owners have of the demographic they're selling to. However, I can't honestly maintian the belief that these things must be mutually exclusive. There's a place for everything.

It cracks me up everytime investors get pissy because a Walmart or Home Depot, or Starbucks can't do 200% a year growth anymore. Do the math kids. If you have 10,000 stores in the US growth has to slow.

Precisely arse_hat. This market pressure drives innovations like "lifestyle marketing." At a macro level it is reflected in the demographic shifts in this country. Cities like Portland and Seattle are marketable for lifestyle purposes. Harry Dent, for example cites this as a major factor driving the growth of resort communities, such as Bend Oregon. With increased affluance and mobility, consumers flock to markets that offer an attractive lifestyle.

"Yeah, I pretty much avoid suburban shopping centers."

Visit the Midwest. Lots of "power centers" everywhere. A Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Starbucks and Applebees etc.

They are like blackholes that suck in massive SUVs filled with the morbidly obese and their squalling ill behaved womb feces.

Once again, I remember why I'm glad I don't live in the midwest anymore. Here, I'd have to drive miles to find one of those places. The power centers and big boxes are located away from the city in the less valuable land on the periphery. Fortunately for us, with a still alive urban core, there's no need to ever visit the squalid suburbs.

My recollection of Milwaukee, my old home, is that much of the in-town retailing had died out due to decades of concentration of poverty and redlining of black neighborhoods. You had to drive to do your shopping. It makes me sad to think about that place.

I like being in aesthitically pleasing surroundings.

Me too, but I find corporately constructed environments to be too false and calculated to have real aesthetics. They're aimed at the largest common denominator. An aesthetically pleasing environment, to me, is never a store but a public park, a well-built theatre, a cathedral, a museum, a summer camp, a beach, a gracious outdoor promenade, a fire ring, or a person's home. These stores are attempting a pathetic approximation of those real experiences, asking us to bring the thirsts of our souls to be slaked at a dry fount.

Visit the Midwest. Lots of "power centers" everywhere. A Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Starbucks and Applebees etc.

They are like blackholes that suck in massive SUVs filled with the morbidly obese and their squalling ill behaved womb feces.

In small-town Ohio where my b/f lived, the builidng of a Walmart half a mile from Main Street effectively killed the small businesses in town.

Never having been in a Walmart before, I confess I was seduced by the 'everything under one roof' culture, with the strip mall alongside containing the ubiquitous Dollar Tree, Vietnamese nail bar, Chinese buffet, and a few fast food places. It's all just soooo convenient. And cheap. And soulless. I liked the people I met who worked in that local Walmart - just good country people trying to make a living at the biggest employer in town, trying not to get screwed too hard by the corporate giant.

They're trying to regenerate Main Street. There's still a few stores there - a hardware store, Julie's Cafe, the bakery, a needlecraft store (whose owner told me that Walmart wasn't killing her business, the internet was), but people don't want to park on the street and walk between stores if they can get it all under one roof without thinking too much about it.

George hated Walmart with a passion and used small businesses wherever he could, but they're all disappearing. It's happening in the UK too, massive retail parks sucking the life out of towns, and every medium-sized town or city in England looking like an identikit of the one 40 miles away, all the same chainstores, no choice, no regional variety.

I hate Starbucks coffee. Bitter and overpriced. And those goddam frappucchino things - cold coffee and air. A stroke of marketing genius, without a doubt, at three quid a cup.

three quid a cup? christ, a pint costs 2 quid thirty pence here.

I liked the people I met who worked in that local Walmart - just good country people trying to make a living at the biggest employer in town, trying not to get screwed too hard by the corporate giant.

Yeah, it's basically the modern-day version of the mines and the mills. Nothing new under the sun, just your standard class exploitation enabled by an overly business-friendly government.

Starbucks creates jobs for over 96,000 employees worldwide. Sorry, you aren’t one of them, LT. But the animosity exhibited towards large corporations who provide jobs and donate millions of dollars to nonprofit organizations seems to be it’s own form of hysteria. If you don't like their product, fine, don't use it. But bashing big companies just to bash them (on what seems to me rather personal reasons, not arguments around business practices) is another bandwagon to jump on.

I’m not a sheep in a flock. I make my own decisions about what I like. I like Torrefazione coffee (owned by Starbucks). I work at Microsoft and love it there.

And experiential marketing? Hey, hope you aren’t buying Hallmark cards or using an ipod or even going to any cultural events in your area. Because they all sell an experience as part of their product. (Totally agree with Pie’s comments.)

While it may be the case that some people dislike culture-homogenizing, over-roasted-coffee-selling, fake-Italian-using, frivolous-lawsuit-filing, mermaid-genital-expurgating, globalizing megacorporations because it's, y'know, the cool thing to do, saying that bashing big companies is 'another bandwagon to jump on' isn't a meaningful response to the legitimate criticisms that activists, coffee lovers, fans of local culture and others raise about Starbucks.

That said, is this one of those issues that, no matter how much they're discussed, nobody ever changes their mind?

(Also, I agree with matildaben, and amro, and miko, and mullacc, and... well, quite a few other posters, for that matter. This topic really draws a crowd.)

Also, serendipity.

the growth of the market for boutique coffee has been driven by Starbucks

Exactly. For vast swaths of America, including a lot of beautiful places, "coffee" was always a bland gray dishwatery substance. Starbucks showed America what good coffee is. The "Starbucks is crap" argument is elitist nonsense. Sure Peets and a dozen other places make better coffee. If you live in a place where you have thos options, go for it and Godspeed. But Starbucks is 1000% better than what has come before for many of us.

But here in Joplin, Missouri, coffee has sucked for as long as anyone can remember and that is the way God has wanted it. Every couple years an independent espresso stand would open up. But from a lack of decent suppliers, or the inability to hire employees who knew what good coffee was supposed to taste like, or from the simple failure to clean their machines, the espresso always tasted like ass. Local folks would think "OK, I'll try one of these here lattes I saw people drinking on TV," immediately followed by "Gah! I paid three bucks for this? Give me some Maxwell House!"

Starbucks came in a year-and-a-half ago. Some of the local coffee stands went out of business, as they richly deserved to do. The others are actually paying a little atention to quality control and the coffee is improving. So what exactly is the downside?

I decided a long time ago that I'd boycott Starbucks when I move to someplace with good alternatives and/or have the car to get to them. I hate the sizing, the way cashiers ask for my name, the overpriced dried-out baked goods, that they refuse to make iced cappuccinos, and the crazy swirly homogenized decor, especially that little round shelf with the folded metal edge that they put finished drinks on. But there aren't many other accessible places in this town where I can hang out and do work for as long as I want with just one order of food or drink or whatever.

If they do not know of it already, Starbucks will need to be informed of this boycott. Otherwise, those boycotting will simply be absorbed into the demographic containing those who do not yet spend money at Starbucks or have been seduced away somehow. The Starbucks marketing department will therefore see these folks as a ripe market rather than resistant consumers.

If the boycott is to have a hope in hell, it has to have its own marketing campaign (a repulsive concept of its own, imho). If Starbucks can't explain a loss of revenue as being the result of a consumer action, the boycotters will only be justifying the salaries of those in Starbucks marketing.

Every office and every retail shop seems to engage in dreadful practices and are, to some degree, soul killing. That's America and that is all of western civilization as I know it from a personal experience with its own limit.

It isn't Starbucks. That is just one facet of a greedy gem. The same thing goes on at the Gap, McDonalds, Exxon, 7-11 and other crap palaces to infinite to name.

Giving up an addiction to convenience is difficult.

The old saying "Think globally and act locally" stands. If Starbucks has run all of your local coffee houses out of business, you might consider another cause as countering their moves is possibly too late. People bitched when Starbucks started opening stores directly next to Peets coffee shops in the Bay Area. But nothing was really done about it and while Peets is still there (or was to the best of my knowledge), it isn't as convenient as Starbucks and, thus, it has lost market share. It is all market share. It is all numbers, but that is how you get your food. Even people such as the Amish have to come to town to buy flour or nails or some such.


But if this is your cause, make sure you write Starbucks. It is said that one letter of praise or complaint is equal to 5,000 voices too lazy to speak.

Bitching is fun but only speaking out can make a difference.

they all sell an experience as part of their product

Except that cultural organizations don't think in terms of 'product' and 'selling' -- they begin and end with the experience. It's the private sector that appropriated the idea of 'experience,' as a value in itself, directly from culture.

When I'm on my deathbed, I know what kind of life I'm going to want to look back over, and 'experiences' in stores feature very little in those visions.

It occurs to me that Starbucks is doing something uprecedented: mass-marketing a luxury item.

All other mass-marketing involves low prices as part of the equation. For example, Wal-mart and other big box retailers offer low prices and wide selection. The trade-off is poor service. McDonalds and other fast-food offer low prices and convenience (and maybe familiarity). The trade-off is crappy food.

But Starbucks' prices are higher than the competition, either other chain coffee places like Dunkin Donuts or local coffee shops. There's no trade-off implied. You get premium coffee and good service and you pay full price and then some for it.

Has any other business pulled this off? It really is marketing genius. For me, however, I can only admire marketing genius at a distance. Good products at good prices sell themselves. It takes marketing genius to get people to pay more for less. So if I recognize that someone's done a good job of marketing I therefore don't want to be their customer.

Actually, Miko, having worked in marketing for both nonprofit arts organizations and for profit corporations, I find nonprofits (the ones I worked with) absolutely do think of product and selling. The product is just more intangible for a symphony performance than for a cup of coffee. But you can't simply offer concerts and hope people will come - marketing is still required, especially as consumer choices for free time face heavy competition with other lesiure activities (internet, reading, etc.).

Mass-marketing "luxury" items: cosmetics counters, Sunglass Hut, limited edition t-shirts, Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods, etc...

Diva, my career's been in nonprofit. I know the marketers in not-forprofits do need to think in terms of 'selling'. However, please note that the raison d'existance of not-for-profits is, wel, not for profit. These organizations are mission-driven; the content or experience is the goal. The marketing and finance end exists only to support the goal. In for-profit enterprises, by definition, profit is the goal, and the product exists to support the goal. The polarity is reversed.

So Miko, what you're saying is that you've got a problem with the concept of making products for a profit? Or am I misreading your comments?