You Will Be(an) Assimilated

So if I decide to go off of Starbucks completely, by which I mean a complete revocation of support for their product, would I have to stop drinking the Starbucks coffee we proudly brew at work - or just always remember to bring in my own cup so that I don’t have to lay out any cash for it? To paraphrase George Carlin (or maybe quote exactly, I’m not sure): These are the kinds of questions that kept me out of the really good schools.

Ooh...does that last sentence make me ineligible to be Vice President of the United States? I did attribute it to the person who said it, of course...but have I ever said it out loud and not attributed it to George Carlin?

Anyway...here’s the thing. Starbucks is currently getting cornholed by the law of diminishing returns, a simple economic principle that has been the Achilles heel of so many greedy CEOs in this goofy country that you would think someone would have learned by now. They built too many stores way too fast (using the Resistance Is Futile business model) and now have two major problems to worry about, along with their metastasizing payroll.

First is competition, mostly from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, but also from the independent coffee shops that refuse to die, Darwin bless them. I tried one cup of iced coffee at McDonald’s, and to say that it sucked out loud would be generous. I’ve also tried the coffee (the standard brewed variety) at Dunkin’ Donuts - once. Unlike McDonald’s, though, I would have coffee (and try an espresso drink) at Dunkin’ Donuts again, if for no other reason than that I can also get the most amazing donut ever - the Bavarian Cream. Mmm...donuts.

Where was I? Right - second thing putting the corn in Starbucks’ hole is that whole economic downturn that people are talking about, and high gas prices, and all the rest of it. You’ve heard of this thing, right? I was in Lazy Daze a couple of months ago - maybe longer than that, I don’t recall exactly - and ordered what was then my usual beverage, a four-shot large iced hazelnut latté. They whipped it up for me - and if you haven’t stood at the counter at Lazy Daze and experienced the aroma of their espresso shots being pressed and poured, then your cosmic coffee adventure is tragically incomplete - and then rang it up, and the total was greater than five dollars.

And this caused me to reflect. Most people would probably say that five bucks for a cup of coffee is excessive - conveniently forgetting or not even considering in the first place that my $5 latté is twenty-four ounces, which is at least 2-3 cups in ceramic coffee mugs of the usual size - but I think that five bucks is the upper limit, even for that much joe. And I’m a coffee guy. There are a lot of average coffee drinkers out there who are drastically reducing how many times they go to Starbucks, largely due to the effects of this being a country full of people who are too stupid and Republican to shake the damned oil monkey.

The net result of all of this is that Starbucks is closing some 600 stores by the end of this year, including several here in the greater metro area. And, they’ve brought back Howard Schultz for another go at CEO. Schultz is to Starbucks what Steve Jobs is to Apple, and Starbucks undoubtedly took note of how much success Apple has had since they lured Jobs (and, significantly, the core of what would become the new operating system for the Mac) away from NeXT in the late 1990s.

And the first big idea from Schultz, apart from closing stores and getting rid of those goofy breakfast sandwiches? That would be buying the company that makes a little machine called the Clover, a rather fancy brewing system that makes one cup at a time and is supposedly the very best thing ever in the history of coffee. Or so they say. The best part, though, according to this article from AP, posted on MSNBC, is that Starbucks now plans to stop selling the Clover to other coffee shops. That’s nice, don’t you think? True, it’s plain old capitalism, which we’re compelled to love with all our hearts if we want to be known as patriots in this country, but it also sort of sucks.

I think we run into a problem when we start to conflate greed with capitalism. Starbucks expanded too much, too fast, but instead of fixing their business model, they're just going to buy up what someone else has done and keep pretending that they were doing it the right way all along. I don’t know if the Clover coffee brewing system is in place at any local shops around town (and if so, will they have to give them back now that Starbucks has pulled a John Hammond and piggybacked the technology?), nor if any of the Starbucks stores around here that survive the purge will ever have it - but that’s hardly the point. I think it’s pretty uncool that from now on you’ll have to go to Starbucks to get a cup of coffee from this thing. That’s presuming that you don’t have the $11,000 to pony up for one of your own - if you can still get one.

Starbucks won’t be losing much money from me, because I don’t get espresso drinks there very often anymore - there are plenty of independent places around town, many within walking distance of a Starbucks, that serve espresso drinks and drip coffee that are just as good as (and often better than) Starbucks, including the Abbey, the South Bend Chocolate Company, the Monon, Henry’s On East, and Lazy Daze, and that's not even getting into the atmosphere of those places - but I do go in for a cup of brewed coffee several nights a week after work or before I sit down to start writing, and once in awhile for espresso when there's nothing else around. Not anymore.