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With Howard Schultz back at the helm, the mammoth Starbuckian vessel is tightening up as the company comes to terms with what it has created: a fierce market for a much-loved, though fairly straightforward product.
(Cue Dan Aykroyd in the climax of Ghostbusters.) One of the many questions this well-publicized housecleaning brings up is: can Starbucks move backward as deftly as it moved forward? In other words, can Starbucks continue to compete in the very market it popularized?
In a word: unlikely.
Quality coffee, it turns out, is far more abundant than Starbucks had us believing when they first opened. Along with exotic, confusing size names (“tall,” “grande,” and “venti,” but let’s not get into the lexigraphical labyrinths inherent to these choices), we have come to expect all sorts of unfamiliar, though culturally exciting encounters at Starbucks over the years (cups and cups of coffee like Ethiopia Yergacheffe, Arabian Mocha Sanani, Kenya, Guatemala Antiqua, Caffè Verona, Colombia Nariño Supremo, for example). Certainly these blends of coffee have long been available, but it was Starbucks who undoubtedly championed the sale of intimidating and expensive caffeinated beverages to us on a daily, nay impulsive basis. We bought what we didn’t understand because it no doubt made us feel cultivated.
But, as Starbucks grew larger and busier, its customers came to comprehend and appreciate what they were drinking. Much to Schultz’s chagrin, in fact, Starbucks’ general omnipresence has created a comfortable (and profitable) niche for quaint anti-Starbuckian cafes in which espresso is still artistically and carefully pulled, and baristas don’t have to wear ghastly green aprons. Now, whereas Starbucks has sternly prided itself on being extremely efficient and consistent (its espresso machines are almost fully automatic and identical between stores across the nation), people seem to have remembered that faster is not necessarily better and that “perfect” is often another word for “bland.”
We’ll have to wait and see whether Schultz’s removing the stores’ many tchotchkes and “retraining” all of the company’s employees will be enough to convince the coffee-craving public (the very one Schultz created) that Starbucks still knows what quality coffee looks and tastes like. For now, it’s full steam ahead. In an overtly visual effort, for example, perhaps to get back to its more un-corporate days, Starbucks is making varied and frequent use of its original logo (a full-bodied two-tailed siren) as opposed to its now-ubiquitous one (a toned-downed and stylized close-up of the same siren) on many of its cups and employee uniforms.
My hunch, however, is that (like most original trendsetters), Starbucks will not be able to sufficiently reel back in all of those in whom it created a lust for caffeine. In fact, in attempting to be anything other than what they’ve become (a huge, fast, corporate machine), Starbucks is only capable of becoming a farce of itself. Whether Schultz, or anyone else for that matter, sees it yet or not, Starbucks is destined for McDonalification, if it hasn’t happened already.
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