Via Yahoo News:
“… hot breakfast sandwiches become the first casualty of the company’s battle to win back customers.
The sandwiches, which will disappear by this fall, boost a typical store’s annual revenue by $35,000, so pulling them off the menu will cost at first.”
First, I applaud the team there to decide what’s best for Starbucks over the long term, even though the sandwiches they are slashing are making them money now.
From personal experience I am guessing there are other reasons why they may be loosing customers.
I never cared for their sandwiches to begin with, but I did have occasional problems with their coffee. The baristas did not make a consistent cup of cappuccino - sometimes too much milk, sometimes too little, etc.
It’s often a gamble to go into many Starbucks stores, you don’t know that what you’ll get is what you really expected. For $3-$4 per cup, of course I care if they don’t get it right.
I think Starbucks is in some way also due to the fact that they are almost the only game in town in the USA in the type of coffee and experience it serves. Everything else around that is “on the go” (at least in New York) is just mystery brew.
But consider that Starbucks actually closed operations in Israel in 2003. The reason is that Israel already had a great culture of great coffee on almost any corner. It is the Italian gourmet quality to which the locals there have become accustomed. Starbucks didn’t have an edge on coffee here, and only some edge on the experience. The idea of corporate coffee in middle east just doesn’t fly.
In downtown Manhattan where I write this now, thankfully we now have a good alternative around the corner - Financier.
Financier has a great pastry selection that Starbucks does not. And they use the Illy coffee brand which I find much more tasteful than Starbucks. Best of all the guys there make it just right almost all the time. Prices are comparable. Gotta love competition.
So we are seeing the monopoly factor changing slowly over time, and I think Starbucks is slowly seeing slight drops in traffic as a result. Good to see they care about it, but I’d also focus their time on making a consistently great drink for customers, not just 60% of the time.
After experiencing the coffee culture in many different countries in the past few years I can only agree with your reasoning. Starbucks in many countries are just a middle of the road “Coffe R Us” with the only benefit of being very accessible in big city centres.
In countries where there’s a gourmet coffee culture Starbucks has a much harder fight to stay relevant. I enjoy a good cup of coffee and this whole Starbucks issue became quite clear during my recent stay in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne (and many other cities down under) are blessed with an excellent café culture and have quality coffee on almost every street corner. So I found myself almost never dropping by a Starbucks to get my fix. The quality was always better elsewhere. This differed a lot from my stay in NYC where often Starbucks felt like the safest choice.
I’d think if Starbucks shaped up their policies with regard to coffee making and managed to serve coffee of consistent quality they’d get a stronger position on the market. I have the feeling they are quite vulnerable to upstarts with a higher focus on quality atm.