Coffee Buzzards: Falling Off The Starbucks (Band)wagon

Everybody’s talking about Starbucks lately.

And it’s not the kind of buzz the Seattle-based corporate cafe is trying to generate.

It’s trash talk in the wake of Starbucks' announcement that it plans to close 600 stores or 10% of its US outlets.

There was a time when Starbucks was cool. It is the prototype for the modern café: espresso-fueled foamy beverages, cool music, beautiful people composing novels or blogging on iBooks, while hip baristas add attitude to the ambience.

But then, it grew. And grew. And GREW. Pretty soon, there wasn’t a street corner, subway station, mall, freeway exit or office building without a Starbucks outlet.

On the one hand, that was a good thing. No matter where you go, there’s Starbucks. For those of us who remember the indifferent coffee landscape BS (Before Starbucks), it’s nice to know there’s a decent cup of coffee within reach. Literally. All you have to do is reach out your hand, and someone will fill it with a triple grande non-fat latte.

On the other, it’s bad. It’s clearly impossible to open a new location every 15 minutes and hang onto your soul. As it went public and expanded Starbucks went from being a pioneer bringing Italian café culture to Middle America to just another fast food joint, the Subway of coffee, making enemies along the way.

It was inevitable. People who go to Subway (or Arby’s, KFC, McDonald’s Burger King, etc) expect a mediocre but acceptable sandwich as quickly as humanly possible. The only expectation is that it will always taste reliably mediocre and will always arrive hot and fast. But Starbucks worked hard to raise our expectations: cool décor, coffee-wonk commentary, progressive sloganeering, and a commitment to excellence in its beans, roast and brew, all justifying a premium price tag, I might add.

But location bloat led to the commoditization of coffee and pretty soon people were complaining about the deterioration of the product, the service, the whole experience. Wherever you go, jaded customers tell stories of cold beverages, errors in orders, indifferent employees, mind-numbing music and jolt-inducing price increases.

It got so bad that returning CEO George Schultz recently shut down early and kept everyone around for a remedial lesson in brewing a decent beverage. But that did nothing to staunch the flow of coffee drinkers to other chains and other, better beverages. And now, with the economy growing cold and dark, so are 600 Starbucks locations. And some coffee wonks are wondering: is this just the beginning of the end? Will people who now patiently stand in line to pay $5 for a cup of coffee wake up and find themselves standing in line for a $5 cup of coffee? (It was all a bad dream…)

You should know that I am Starbucks or Starbucks am I. Ever since Starbucks boldly opened coffee shops directly across the street from each other (!) here in Vancouver, I’ve defended the brew. Let me count the ways Starbucks has improved the lives of coffee drinkers everywhere (you ungrateful wretches—you know who you are). Before Starbucks, there was no such thing as dark roast; there was only the daily grind. No one knew the difference between Arabica and robusta; there was only the daily grind. If you wanted a latte, Bud, go to Italy. Here we got coffee, your choice of cream, sugar, or black. Nobody, especially the people dishing it out, cared if the coffee tasted like dishwater or battery acid. If you were lucky you got fresh dishwater; if not, the stuff in the pot had been congealing for hours before it corroded your stomach. Starbucks has completely revised the java landscape in a good way, and now, in its hour of need, we who drink coffee should remember that.

Unfortunately, we, the coffee drinking public, is not famous for its loyalty. Starbucks spawned imitators, and many of those imitators are simply better – better beans, better roast, better brew. Same price or less. We can kid ourselves into believing that we’re supporting a local business, but if the local businesses haven’t gone to school on Starbucks and learned the tricks of the trade, do you think we’ll go there? Nope. Now we require cute and clever foamy flowers in our lattes; we’re looking for greater variety and taste in the bakery items; we want free wi-fi. Give us that and we’ll cross the street to line up at your place for a $5 cup of coffee.

So we’re fickle and we’re on edge from all that caffeine. Starbucks, we don’t care if you brought us to the promised land; what have you done for us lately? Starbucks seems stuck in Y2K or somewhere where they haven’t learned to make foamy flowers. Like so many revolutionaries, Starbucks has gone from the solution to the problem, virtually overnight. It’s kind of sad, don’t you think?