Hasta Barista, baby: Starbucks closures spark protests
Updated on 20 July 2008
You might call it a grande problem. Six hundred Starbucks stores across the United States, closing their doors - leaving the locals latte-deprived and desperate.
Newspaper headlines talk of communities 'jolted', or 'bracing themselves' - 'save our Starbucks' petitions have been started up - and the company's promised to 'reach out to customers who are impacted by the closures'.
The company's struggling with falling sales and increased competition - and in these belt-tightening times, five bucks on a coffee does seem like a disposable luxury. Hence the closures - which represent almost ten percent of all stores across the US. Even Manhattan's been affected - with 11 downtown coffee shops shutting their doors.
Regulars aren't happy: 'I think having a Starbucks in your building is a Manhattan right' said one law intern with typical hubris - while one young woman wailed 'Honestly, it's just awful'. Just as dire was a gossip site which screamed 'the very Starbucks you hit up every morning for your triple shot latte might be gone.. you should be FREAKING OUT!'
As the Daily News points out - there are still 225 locations throughout the city, but to many, that's just not the point.
Having a Starbucks in your neighbourhood was once a sign of approval - the company consistently refused to open in areas it considered too downmarket for its brand. And for some areas, it was like having a little piece of urban cool, the real world beyond your backyard. Take this, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune: 'Starbucks was like an embassy of a country where people sat around and read foreign newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and discussed things.'
But rapid expansion - the firm has doubled in size over the last 4 years - didn't just dilute the coffee, but some of the disciplined standards it had always adhered to. Often there were just too many Starbucks crammed onto a block and the stores found themselves competing with each other.
So the company boss Howard Schultz is going 'back to basics' - closing those excess locations and laying off as many as 12,000 employees, in the biggest cutbacks in its history.
But the company hasn't given up its drive to expand. Far from it. Some of the savings from the US closures will be reinvested, in the UK for a start - but mainly in China. Yes, China, where you'd be surprised to hear there are already 300 Starbucks stores and at least another 80 on the way.
As the company's Greater China President Wang Jinlong told Bloomberg news, the famously tea-drinking nation "has the potential to become the largest market outside the US" for the frothy-caffeine purveyors - and he's dreaming not just of hundreds, but thousands and thousands of stores.
Coming next on the Starbucks menu: a tall drip coffee of the day - with bird's nest soup on the side?
