Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Starbucks - Glad Tidings
Bryan is strangely addicted to Starbucks (it can't be the coffee...), but for me the sight of a new branch is about as cheering as a new estate agent opening for business. As Jackie Mason has often reminded us, Starbucks is there to make us queue up for cardboard buckets of under-strength, over-priced beverages barely worthy the name of coffee. I am happy then to pass on this news to any who might have missed it. The sting in the tail, though, is the suggestion that, faced with market collapse in the US, Starbucks will set its sights on foreign parts. That might mean us...
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Do they sell coffee as well?
ReplyDeleteI thought they were merely purveyors of Hot Milky Drinks which are given interesting Italian names to which they bear no relation. But coffee as well you say? Well I never........
They also do a good blueberry cheesecake. And i have some appalled admiration for their whole 'be a bohemian, be reckless, be artistic and crazy and off-the-wall, and buy your pseudo-coffee in one of our thousands of identical corporate outlets. All profits go to making incredibly rich American CEOs even more incredibly rich. Just like Picasso!' thing. It's quite clever, really.
ReplyDeleteI do believe that the profits have thus far gone to make thousands of stockholders quite wealthy. As for the evil empire itself, it should be noted that prior to its arrival on the scene, it was next to impossible to find even a half-way decent cup of coffee in almost all of America. From the Credit-where-credit-is-due department.
ReplyDeleteI love Starbucks. But then, I don't drink coffee. Never have. But their caramel coffee Frappuccino (with whipped cream, natch) is like crack.
ReplyDeleteThough it ought to make me ashamed, I kinda like the reassuring, almost eerily exact, 'sameness' of the experience, wherever you are in the world. As I discovered to my brazen delight yesterday with a few hours to kill in Singapore.
As it happens, their ten-year plan in the UK already involved opening up a new outlet every fortnight, so one can only hope there will be no acceleration...
ReplyDeleteA year or so ago I went onto their website, where it says "find your nearest Starbucks" or whatever - you type in your postcode and it tells you all the branches within a five-mile radius - and, well, I live in London N16, and I was within five miles of about 120 branches!
Scary, or what. And that's before the ten-year plan.