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Starbucks Ennui

Tony Wanless

| April 28, 2009

Image by: Starbucks

There’s a palpable sadness in the streets today. Starbucks is apparently retrenching from its relentless expansion in BC.

These cappuccino capitalists from Seattle turned Vancouver, which was pretty well wool and hiking boot culture, into the centre of Coffee Cool. A place where boulevardiers gathered to sip Ventes and stare at each other, like cool places such as Paris. Where people could have discussions about coffee that would put wine snobs to shame. A place where you could arrogantly (and usually at high speed) dismiss every other city in Canada as so backward.

Suddenly, a city where lingering for more than 10 minutes over a coffee was almost a criminal act became the centre of leisurely West Coast thinking, symbolized explicitly by the duelling Starbucks stores on Robson Street that, miraculously it seemed, both thrived.

As imitators piled into the market and the coffee culture spread, another phenomenon happened. The corner coffee shop became a business centre, where hundreds, if not thousands, of people conducted their daily work. I once tried to calculate how much economic activity was done in coffee shops, but gave up at the sheer enormity of the task.

But like all things that become popular, there was a limit. Pretty soon there seemed to be wall to wall coffee shops on every block. The population was divided into two types of people – the Starbucks crowd and the Tim Horton's people (an analysis that was once used to account for a federal election result).

Starbucks became so common you noticed if there wasn’t one in the grocery store where you schlepped your weekly groceries. The saturation level Starbucks logo became wallpaper, almost boring in its ubiquity.

So the company is pulling the plug on some of its BC stores and deploying its expansion juggernaut in places like Poland, where they haven’t hit Starbucks ennui just yet.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for every twittering trendoid and bandwagon jumping business out there.

Like yesterday’s java, everything gets stale eventually.

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And yet, Vancouver artisanal

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2009-05-07 17:14.

And yet, Vancouver artisanal coffee shops like Artigiano, JJ Bean, 49th Parallel, Elysian and Take 5 are thriving ... years ago Starbucks made the fatal mistake of sacrificing quality for the sake of quantity: unlike their new competitors, Starbucks' fully-mechanized espresso machines don't require a skilled operator; their caffe lattes, cappuccinos and macchiatos are consistently sub-standard, over-roasted, over-drawn, too hot, too watery, and the machines don't allow the barista to make adjustments to improve quality - not that their staff would know how. The upwardly mobile, caffeine-addicted masses got bored of paying a premium for coffee that was no longer distinguishable from the more reasonably priced Tim's coffee next door. I for one continue to pay a premium for higher quality coffee, but choose to spend my money somewhere that knows how to make one, that trains its staff in the art of coffee, and yes, that takes pride in this particular kind of cafe snobbery. I'll remain loyal to all those cafes that continue to value the quality of their product over the number of their storefronts.

Good comment, Anon. We'd

Submitted by jbucher on Fri, 2009-05-08 08:14.

Good comment, Anon. We'd like to publish it as a letter to the editor. Please contact me at jbucherATcanadawideDOTcom. John Bucher Editor, BCBusiness Online