The Dark Ages

[keystricken]

Yesterday, eating dinner with great-aunt and other relatives:

Monica: So what were your summer jobs? Were you ever a bookstore clerk or a barista?
Bob: We didn't have baristas in my day.
Monica: But... but then where did you get your coffee?
Bob: I had to make it!
Monica: ohhhh.

Later,

Monica: But wait a minute! Coffeeshops existed in the Soviet

Comments

[mycroftholmes]

Proof that coffee is the root of all evil.

[cos]

I can't find it now, but I remember reading an article years ago about Starbucks pulling out of Italy and Israel. They quoted a Starbucks executive, IIRC, explaining that Starbucks does really well entering a country that doesn't have an established culture of cafes and coffee-drinking, and they cause one to start, but if they try to enter a country that already has such a culture, they do poorly because everyone already has their favorite coffee shops. This explanation suggests that this cafe culture they described only formed in the past few decades in many countries.

The Wikipedia entry on Starbucks says:

Entrepreneur Howard Schultz joined the company in 1982, and, after a trip to Milan, advised that the company sell coffee and espresso drinks as well as beans. The owners rejected this idea, believing that getting into the beverage business would distract the company from its primary focus. To them, coffee was something to be prepared in the home. Certain that there was much money to be made selling drinks to on-the-go Americans

[keystricken]

Yeah, the Willy Week published an "exposé" on Starbucks a few years ago, in which they investigated several common claims (e.g. Starbucks coffee is crap, they treat their employees poorly) and discovered that only one was definitively true.* In fact, a couple were actually true-in-reverse, such as the claim that Starbucks pushes small locally-owned coffeeshops out of business. Apparently the distribution of coffeeshops has been studied over time, and we've found that Starbucks (with its reassuring brand name recognition) does the early work of promoting a café culture in which other coffeeshops can find footholds. Not to say that this hasn't happened without Starbucks in some places, but they should be acknowledged at least.

* that one being: "Starbucks contributes to a homogenized coffee culture," as we can see from all the Frappucino clones and hopelessly bad "seasonal" drinks that infect even the better coffeeshops. And speaking as someone who's actually tried an eggnog chai latté: bleah.

[cos]

From what I've heard, they treat their employees better than most similar sorts of jobs.

As for pushing small locally owned coffeehouses out: Yes, it happens a lot. Also, sometimes they just buy small local chains, which is equally distressing to the fans of those places. This is balanced out by the fact that they often catalyze the creation of new local coffeehouses, though I think those may be in other places - so the total number of local coffeehouses may remain the same or even grow due to Starbucks, but it may also shift somewhat from places that had them to places that didn't, and it may involve the closing of existing ones.