Tag Archives: coffee

Starbucks moved away from being a third place, emphasized drive thru and mobile orders

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Is Starbucks no longer a gathering place?

Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.com

The idea of Starbucks as a third place became part of its corporate mythology. Starbucks aimed to create a welcoming environment for coffee drinkers and employees with comfortable seating, jazz music and the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee. Employees who brewed and served Starbucks coffee, whom Starbucks called baristas, handwrote customers’ names on their drink orders…

Mobile app and drive-thru orders make up more than 70% of Starbucks’ sales at its approximately 9,500 company-operated stores in the United States. In some stores, customers complained online that Starbucks pulled out comfortable chairs and replaced them with hard wooden stools. Starbucks has also built pickup-only stores without seating. Machines that print customers’ names have replaced baristas’ handwriting on cups.

“Third place is a broader definition,” current Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said last year. The “classic definition of third place — it’s a box where I go to meet someone — it’s frankly not relevant anymore in this context.”…

Starbucks’ changes to its sit-down business model came in response to several trends — demand from customers for ordering coffee from their cars in drive-thru lanes or on their smartphones. The shift from a business serving hot coffee to one in which cold coffees, teas and lemonades make up more than half of sales. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced cafes to shut indoor seating.

Starbucks shifted to meet Wall Street’s demands, too. Starbucks found it could reduce labor costs and increase order volume by running a mostly drive-thru and take-away coffee business. Starbucks also found difficulties with being America’s third place and did not want to become the public space and bathroom for everyone, including people coming into stores who were homeless or struggling with mental health challenges on city streets. Starbucks has closed some stores and restricted bathroom access over safety concerns.

The shifts make sense: more consumers want quick service and coffee to go, the company and shareholders want to make more money, and serving the public can be difficult.

But this is a different approach to coffee, food, and places more generally. Getting coffee to consumers as cheaply and quickly as possible and when and where they desire it treats place differently. Arguably, you might not even need a location any longer. Can we get Starbucks via drones or by drivers within ten minutes of an order? Why bother going to a location at all? Why not have a huge centralized Starbucks that sends out drinks at light speed in all directions?

The purpose of third places is less about consumption and more about social interaction and conversation. Yes, third places like cafes and pubs have food. But the food helps people talk and relax. All humans need to eat – and they also need social connections. Having a refresher in the car while driving – often a solo experience – is a different experience than sitting with friends for half an hour near other people.

Starbucks is not alone in this. McDonald’s is a gathering place for some. But if coffee and fast food places limit seating and primarily want to serve people who do not stay, where can or will people go? Maybe nowhere else. Perhaps this helps give momentum to sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s argument that public schools and libraries should be designed in ways that encourage social interaction.

The value of highlighting Starbucks, since 1971

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In a Starbucks TV commercial, I noticed the company notes it was founded in 1971. Here is a logo from their website that highlights 50 years of business:

Starbucks.com

The company’s website highlights their heritage:

Our story begins in 1971 along the cobblestone streets of Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. It was here where Starbucks opened its first store, offering fresh-roasted coffee beans, tea and spices from around the world for our customers to take home. Our name was inspired by the classic tale, “Moby-Dick,” evoking the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.

Ten years later, a young New Yorker named Howard Schultz would walk through these doors and become captivated with Starbucks coffee from his first sip. After joining the company in 1982, a different cobblestone road would lead him to another discovery. It was on a trip to Milan in 1983 that Howard first experienced Italy’s coffeehouses, and he returned to Seattle inspired to bring the warmth and artistry of its coffee culture to Starbucks. By 1987, we swapped our brown aprons for green ones and embarked on our next chapter as a coffeehouse.

Starbucks would soon expand to Chicago and Vancouver, Canada and then on to California, Washington, D.C. and New York. By 1996, we would cross the Pacific to open our first store in Japan, followed by Europe in 1998 and China in 1999. Over the next two decades, we would grow to welcome millions of customers each week and become a part of the fabric of tens of thousands of neighborhoods all around the world. In everything we do, we are always dedicated to Our Mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time

Fifty years is likely a safe point to highlight a founding date as it is a nice round number, a half century. Sure, 49 or 51 years gets at the same idea but it does not have the gravity of 50. Yet, I could imagine two sides to whether promoting this date is helpful.

On one side, fifty years is a long time. Many businesses do not make it this far. Even fewer companies are so long for so many years. Highlighting the date implies permanence, tradition, stability. Starbucks is not just a passing trend; they are good at what they do, they have been around five decades, and hope to be around for many more.

On the other side, Americans tend to like upstarts and novelty. Does fifty years imply old age and lack of innovation? Starbucks is established while other successful companies are offering new models and products. There are Starbucks locations everywhere but once companies like Sears or Woolworths also thrived.

Even as the company celebrates 50 years, companies are not permanent. Perhaps there is a time when fast food in general no longer exists or people can get similar food products at home. Or, Starbucks does something internally that causes issues. Or who knows what. Does it reach 75 years or 100 years, other round milestones worth celebrating? It is hard to know now; Starbucks will keep going until it doesn’t.

The unreality of coffee cups on TV

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A communications professor provides a reminder of the physical unreality of television:

There are moments when the “realism” of television breaks down: when framed photographs are poorly photoshopped, when video chats are unrealistically high-quality, and when driving scenes are staged using some very obvious rear projection. But for me the biggest threat to realism on television is something you may never have considered: the way that coffee cups that are supposedly full of coffee are plainly empty.

This video attempts to better understand both why this happens and why it bothers me as much as it does. My hope is it can help solve my problem, whether we define that problem as the emptiness of the cups (please support this cause on social media by using #EmptyCupAwards hashtag) or my own obsession with them.

This is just a small example of how television can warp our sense of reality. Even if we watch with a critical eye, television and film provides a complete universe that looks realistic (unless the presentation is emphasizing the lack of realism) but contains all sorts of weird phenomenon. In addition to the empty coffee cups, let me provide a few other examples from my own life:

  1. For a long time, I had a hard time believing that shootings and murders could happen in broad daylight. On the screen, they tend to happen when it is dark or stormy, situations that might be befitting of violent action.
  2. The full geographic scope of communities on television is often skewed – much sitcom actions takes place in a single house or in just a few locations. A show like The Simpsons set in Springfield tends to add parts to the city to suit its needs; Springfield includes these areas: “The city is divided into a number of districts, including Skid Row, the Lower East Side (a Jewish neighborhood), Springfield Heights, Bum Town, East Springfield, Recluse Ranch Estates, Junkieville, Pressboard Estates, South Street Squidport, Little Newark, Crackton, a Russian District, West Springfield, Tibet Town, Waverly Hills, Sprooklyn, Little Italy, and a gay district.”
  3. I have toured several sets in Hollywood and now I can spot them in various places. For example, the Warner Brothers lot has a city setup that is in all sorts of commercials and television shows. Or, we saw Wisteria Lane which could pop up in an Ace Hardware commercial (with some modifications).

The real issue here isn’t the missing coffee; it is that most of the time it is clear whether TV is presenting a more real or less real depiction yet almost all the time it is in small ways defying embodied life.

Talking third places and coffee shops in Calgary

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Sociologist Ray Oldenburg talks about coffee shops as great “third places”:

For as long as there’s been coffee houses, a community of coffee drinkers has been meeting there to chat, learn, share, debate, gossip, scheme, read, and, of course, soak in the rituals of the daily brew.

They serve a vital function: a place where people from all walks of life can gather and mingle.

“It’s a great leveller,” says urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, a Florida based author known best for his book The Great Good Place.

“The people in the coffee shop are essentially equals . . . and that allows all sorts of people to associate. Different backgrounds, different attitudes, different lifestyles.”

I wonder if anyone has ever done research about whether coffee is the best product/food item to bring people together. Wouldn’t places like Starbucks attract different kinds of people than independent coffee houses? The article gives us an example of a neighborhood coffee shop where a mix of people come together. Do people at coffee houses talk with strangers or neighbors regularly, particularly younger generations? Are these sorts of places only possible in denser settings?

Bonus: this article has a lot of information about the coffee scene in Calgary. Another sociologist is quoted as saying, “Pound for pound, there’s far more bad coffee in places like New York than there are in Calgary.” I wonder if the quality of coffee shops correlates with larger percentages of residents who are part of the creative class.

Tim Horton’s as “a place where Canadian values are articulated”

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Politicians are well-known for visiting local restaurants and meeting with potential voters. In Canada, this means that politicians head to Tim Horton’s:

As we enter the home stretch of the election, the most dangerous place to be is between a politician and a Tim Hortons photo-op.

In recent weeks, the doughnut chain has become the parties’ preferred shorthand for patriotism, with leaders battling to sell their image as the Everyman with each double-double…

“It’s not just a coffee shop; it’s a place where Canadian values are articulated,” explained Patricia Cormack, associate professor of sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. “Tim Hortons is connected (through marketing) to community and sacrifice and immigration and family — all those themes that politicians want to attach themselves to.”

The restaurant, in a way, has become the Canadian equivalent of what former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin called “Main Street USA.” Only in this case, it’s a $2.5-billion multinational personifying the people — an irony not lost on those following the campaign online.

This sociologist makes it sounds like politicians want to ride the coattails of Tim Horton’s effective marketing campaigns. As one might imagine, this close identification with a particular large corporation rubs some people the wrong way. The story cites one citizen that suggests more candidates visit Starbucks. There is only one problem: Tim Horton’s is much more popular than Starbucks in Canada.

A 2009 Harris-Decima survey found Tim Hortons people outnumbered Starbucks people by a ratio of 4-1 in Canada, with the former brand traversing age, class, gender and even political philosophy.

So Starbucks is not the answer, at least not for the politician that wants to connect with the “average Canadian voter.” The American equivalent might be going to McDonald’s or Walmart but I don’t think these companies have the popularity that Tim Horton’s has in Canada.

In thinking about this, are there other countries that have something like a “national corporation”?

(I have had one Tim Horton’s experience: it is the only time I have had a combo meal with an apple and a donut.)

Starbucks to expand far beyond coffee

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Starbucks, one of the best symbols of globalization through the spread of its stores and its use of the international coffee commodity chain, is looking to branch out. At about a dozen stores around the world, Starbucks has been testing the sale of wine, beer, and more food. These stores have been informally named “Olive Way.”

This comes in face of competition from retailers like McDonald’s and also in the interest of expanding Starbuck’s reach to customers beyond 11 AM.