Caveat Venditor, Starbucks...

This cartoon is by the ever-brilliant Mick Stevens, New Yorker magazine
Buy the framed print at http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Braithwaite-Starbucks-How-may-we-help-you-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8543850_.htm

"What Starbucks has created around coffee is

an extension of the front porch.

If you look at the UK, the English pub is an extension of

people's homes but for a different beverage.

Our stores have become a gathering and meeting place

in addition to the coffee."

~Howard Schultz, Chairman/CEO Starbucks

After several weeks of finding local store and office personnel unresponsive to issues regarding faulty Wi-Fi and an approaching remodel of the store, a group of us who are regulars at Starbucks Location X decided to "bump the thread".  We met, listed our specific concerns, and Gitanajava Productions drafted the following letter, written to Starbucks via their website.  We posted our letter the evening of Friday, 6th April 2012.  Now, we're waiting to see what, if any, response we'll get from Starbucks.

Buckle your seatbelts, here we go...

The Coffeehouse Blues

Gitanajava = Gypsy Loves Coffee

(The original Rajah Coffee label was designed by Henri Meunier, 1897,

find it at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rajah-coffee-ad-1897-henri-meunier.jpg)

(This post was originally written, published, and distributed under the title The Coffee Canticle in December 2008.  Although the coffeehouse in question has long since passed on to the celestial heights, the thoughts and sentiments about what remain the same.)


Starbucks #6262, alias Lower Greenville Starbucks, officially closed 2 PM, Friday 19th December 2008.  Even before the farewell party ended at 6 PM, the guerrillas from Starbucks HQ arrived.  While the corpus delicti was still warm, they began taping sheets of brown butcher paper across the windows:  pulling the shroud tight.


When is a cup of coffee more than a cup of coffee?  What recombinant DNA transforms a mere java joint into a legend?

Kahve: The Joys of Java

"Ca Phe Sua Da" on the verandah

Vintage Coffee Packet Label

The Coffee Tribe

Once upon a time in the U.S., a "good cup of coffee" had less to do with the coffee's roast, grind, brew or flavour, and everything to do with the beverage being hot, plentiful, and cheap. 

Marketing Al Fresco

And now, a few words from our sponsor about chilling out on the Starbucks patio to improve your marketing research...

I can circumnavigate the globe with the best GPS ever created, Global Positioning via Starbucks.  Drop me anywhere on the planet, and I will find my way to the nearest Starbucks or patio-con-cafe.  Want to know the coffee house with the best patio, best espresso shot, best crew, worst bathrooms, most corporate lockstep, most responsive and responsible management?  Call me.

My point?  An alert participant in life, his community, and in mundane, everyday conversations can gather an abundance of useful information, voluntarily offered and unobtrusively gathered.  A diligent marketer needn't invade people's privacy or manipulate them to get pertinent data for creating persuasive, appropriate strategies.  Chill out on the nearest java joint terrace and listen ' til it hurts -- and trust me, it will hurt occasionally.  Pay attention, do deep, intense people-watching, interpret a little of what you see and hear, talk a little, question.  PARTICIPATE.

As a friend in the U.K. says,

"Only Americans need a million-dollar survey to tell them the bleeding obvious."

W. Edwards Deming noted the proclivity of American big business to dismiss "unknown and unknowable factors" and business anomalies when he was a consultant to post-war Japan, helping the the shattered country re-invent their economy.  Although he was a reknowned statistician, Deming stated "one of the seven deadly diseases of management is running a company on visible figures alone" -- banking every decision on "statistics in a vacuum."

While American executives remote-controlled their decisions by commissioning study after study of consumer behaviour, Japanese companies sent executives and employes into the marketplace, to observe consumer behaviour first-hand -- at sales counters, in appliance stores, in automobile dealerships.  As Americans lagged behind in the technology and manufacturing race, insistently making big, gas-guzzling cars with fins, the Japanese passed them by with micro-circuitry, compact cars, and attention to detail.  "Made in Japan" ceased being a label to ridicule and became something to emulate.

Decades later, here goes American business again, this time with algorithms and "reality mining" overruling common sense.  To entrepreneurs, micropreneurs, solo-preneurs and marketing people everywhere:  Get out of your cubicles, java-chat your patio mates, and download real life.

After you've done your reality check, then you can supplement what you've heard, observed, and learned with surveys and statistical studies.  With an open mind and open heart, reassess your strategy, rewrite your business plan.  Yes, it may mean pulling a 180 and going an entirely new direction with your cherished, long-harboured idea.  It could mean ditching your scheme completely and starting from scratch.

Scary?  Oh, yeah.  Gut-wrenching, disappointing, and bewildering.  But, profound knowledge (remember, no more "data in a vacuum") is a "[l]ong-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy [and] is required of any management that seeks transformation.  The timid and the fainthearted, and people who expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment." (Deming)

You want BUZZ?  Go for a coffee at the scene of the crime.

See you on the patio! ;-)