Starbucks realizes it’s about the coffee?

Worldview Item of the Day

Starbucks will close all 7100 of its retail stores for three hours today to teach its baristas how to make coffee.

Um, isn’t that what they’ve been saying they’ve been doing all along?

In seriousness though, what makes Starbucks coffee worth $6 is not the coffee itself, but the atmosphere, and part of that atmosphere is knowledgeable baristas who like what they are doing.

So, is atmosphere worth $6 a cup? In some ways, I believe it is. Sometimes, Americans are way too focused on the value of money without much thought about the value of time and experience. Whatever one might think about Starbucks’ coffee, their shops once presented an air of calm sophistication that had a place in our society.

I am not suggesting that we should all try to pretend like we are part of the west coast jet set, rather, I am suggesting that there is a room for places where they play classical music and jazz and people speak proper English more often than not. If that place happens to serve $6 coffee, all the better.

I hope Starbucks’ baristas learn something today and make that coffee worth the $6 again.

-=DLH=-

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6 Responses to Starbucks realizes it’s about the coffee?

  1. chrispy85 says:

    So, what you’re saying is that the baristas don’t need training on how to pull a $6 shot of espresso — but that the entire franchise needs to re-evaluate and re-calibrate its atomosphere?

    The problem is, I’m not sure either one can be accomplished in 3 hours.

  2. dlhitzeman says:

    Yeah, I think that’s what I’m saying, and I agree that it will take a lot more than 3 hours.

    to read the news on the Starbucks website, I think this first attempt is just the beginning of a long process of the company recovering what it used to be.

    Time will tell if they can succeed. If they can’t, someone else will.

    -=DLH=-

  3. keba says:

    Maybe a bi-weekly “refresher” course would be in order…can they at least touch on NOT burning the coffee?

    That’s one of my problems going to an actual Starbucks (not one of the bookstore verstions) – mostly everyone there is pretending to be part of the west coast jet set. Lighten up…you’re in Ohio.

  4. dlhitzeman says:

    I’ve always envisioned a good coffee shop as being the modern equivelant to the old neighborhood pub: a place where people can get together to enjoy each other’s company, to talk, and to share ideas that may not come to light anywhere else.

    I think Starbucks may have had the beginnings of such a place once, but 7100 iterations of the dilution of the original idea has all but eliminated it.

    -=DLH=-

  5. djhitz says:

    DL, the Coffee Bean Barn in the old “Amazing Spider Man Comics Mag.” was your form.
    Six dollar shots of espresso in an America that gets paid about $10 an hour, average, full time is, decadent.
    If you must try Starbucks do so on a hot day this summer. Starbucks, lemonade is very refreshing. There’s a commercial.
    See if you can get Oprah to buy us, cups of quadruple shotted, espresso Americano, after this “barister” training. I’d like them hand deliverd by Henry Schultz himself.

  6. dlhitzeman says:

    I’ve always wanted to establish something like Benjamin Franklin’s “junto”. Finding public places where such things can exist can be almost impossible except for places like Starbucks. That’s the main appeal for places like that for me.

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