Daily Nonsense

 This is an old article I found in my drafts section when I imported all of my posts from my old BlogSpot blog.

I’ve recently been lax posting to this and my other blogs. I got a new job and just don’t have as much time as I used to. But there is one story that has piqued my interest enough for me to make the time for a little posting. And that story is the downfall of Starbucks.

I’m not talking about anything bad from a bottom line sense. At least nothing that I know about. What I am talking about are the bad or at least mediocre marketing decisions they seem to be making.

[Thanks, Gizmodo]

Starbucks Redux…

On the 3rd of March I posted an article about Starbucks and the loss of corporate vision which has reduced the Starbucks experience to something akin of getting a cup of bean at a fast food restaurant. Time Magazine on-line put their own spin on the story with a couple of eye-opening thoughts:

You can’t wake up and smell the coffee at Starbucks. That’s the lament of Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman of the ubiquitous java chain, in an internal memo that recently became external. In this wistful missive, Schultz fretted that, because coffee is delivered in flavor-locked packaging, the atmosphere had changed, the romance evaporated; the Starbucks “experience” of baristas grinding beans, pulling expresso shots and hand-crafting beverages had been automated away by machines that can knock out an expresso with the press of a button.If I may be so bold, Howard, smelling the coffee isn’t the problem — it’s getting to it. In the ‘Bucks nearest my office, I’d venture that two out of five days I don’t have the 15 minutes to wait to purchase a simple cup of black coffee. Just coffee. No milk, no sugar, no syrup, no fooling. No way.

It’s not the atmosphere, Howard. It’s your incompetence. Or at least that of the executives who work for you at your way too laid-back HQ. You’re talking atmosphere when you should be talking about front-end operations. Instead, in my Starbucks we have the morning chaos, the lines stretching all the way to the ludicrously heavy doors, a drill duplicated at the coffee hour of 4 p.m., where they’ve mastered the art of have exactly one less person on hand than needed. Then again, I can’t blame the local manager for this parsimony, since she hardly has any room for more people. The place is too cluttered up with displays of coffeemakers, mugs, CDs, books and that other crap you can’t sell.

Read the full story here!

[Thanks, Time]