Good article from the New York Times.
Summary
Starbucks China is losing customers at a very rapid pace. Starbucks corporate executives are angry. Brian Niccol, the new $100 million CEO of Starbucks, sounded the alarm in October, calling the competition “extreme”. For the Chinese Lunar year, Starbucks released a pork flavor latte. It cost more than $9 and was widely seen as a disaster.
Billionaire Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s former CEO, insisted that Starbucks would not enter a price war in China. He claimed “as chinese customers become more knowledgeable about coffee, they will want to upgrade from lower-end or discounted products”
And somehow mcdonald’s is expected to be quality barbecue?
None of these chains are any good but we use (or used to use them) for convenience and consistency
Never excellence because we know all the excellent places get bought out and turned into corporate shit factories so we pick the least offensive shit factory that suits our lifestyles and just get on with the business of working in a world that is slowly burning down to feed the greed of a pathologically insatiable owner class
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I can make much better coffee at home, and I can take one with me to work in a flask.
But lots of people don’t want to, dont have time to, or can’t make fresh coffee at home and therefore buy it out.
But even if i make it at home, if I want a second coffee during the work day, I’d have to either have instant coffee from work or buy one.
FWIW: My take on Starbucks is that their coffee is a) usually quite average at best, b) variable quality depending upon where you buy it.
Where I live there are lots of alternatives which serve better coffee for about the same price, so I don’t really see any need to use Starbucks.
Last time I had a Starbucks was on a road trip at a motorway service station. It wasn’t very good coffee at all, and afterwards I resented having paid service station prices for a coffee I didn’t enjoy. But in that scenario they have a captive audience.
Fastfoods marketing themselves as luxury brand is a relatively recent trend. A decade or so ago starbacks, mcd’s, etc. really were “cheap, fast, tasty”. Fast food used to be a convenience for when you were on road trips and couldn’t make your own food.
All these different fastfood brands built up such a large reputation around themselves that they practically became a part of our collective conscious. At some point they realised that instead of selling food, they could sell their brand. And that’s when it stopped being cheap, stopped being tasty, and generally became a “rich people” thing.
I can’t believe you literally think this is a legit question
Do you carry your home with you in your pocket when you go out? Then maybe write me a three paragraph mini paper on convenience and why gas stations charge ten bucks for a small carton of coffee creamer if you don’t want to be blocked
People like you are the reason the internet is shit nowadays
Convenience? The fuck are you talking about?? Have you never heard of soluble coffee? I carry a jar of soluble coffee in my backpack when I go to uni. They have those instant water boiling taps on every floor in my faculty building, I can make myself a mug just like that. Is it good? No. But certainly better than starbucks.
But whatever, I’m not going to argue with someone who’s trying to convince me that the thing I do almost every day with no issues is actually impossible.
The fuck are you smoking? Never heard of a thermos can? Small carry bags to fit it and some lunch (sandwich, piece of fruit)?
Or has that become so foreign and alien to you that you just can’t fathom how any of that is possible?
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Peak .world behavior right there
I think they’re referring to their username, not just escalating to 100 out of nowhere.
Saying that, I have “idiot” in some of my usernames and am always surprised when people use it as a comeback. Like, I’m calling myself an idiot, do you think it has any effect when someone else does?
Back on subject, my view for what it’s worth is this shows how different we are - some people want a coffee out, some are prepared to take a ready made one. I don’t really crave coffee out of the house so wouldn’t do either
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And you sound like a blocked and reported neurotypical asshat
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Starbucks positions itself internationally as an ultra premium brand. I remember visiting one in Thailand and being astounded that the prices were the same as the USA, just converted to bhat. This meant that a single drink could cost like half a day’s wages for a poor Thai person. I imagine the situation in China used to be similar before wages and purchasing power caught up. Now that consumers in China know enough about coffee to tell that Starbucks is crap, they won’t pay American prices for it any more, and it’s got Starbucks sweating.
And Fosters positioned itself as a premium import beer when the real reason they sold it here was no one in Australia would touch the stuff
Marketing is lying and we shouldn’t let them get away with it by calling it positioning
They sell it as a premium product in the US? That is funny.
Hmm, it was less a ‘premium’ and more it was selling the rough, laid back, no bullshit lifestyle as presented by Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee
So it wasn’t really marketed as a ‘quality’ beer as much as a personality accessory
Most of the world jokes about American beer being basically water and they aren’t wrong, but man Fosters has even less body than coors light
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McDonald’s coffee is much better than Starbucks. Still not great, but better.
true but that is more of a happy accident than product excellence in the fast food market
I didn’t know about the US but in Canada McDonald’s uses the supplier that used to supply Tim Hortons back before their coffee was enshittified by the corporate grindhouse, which makes McDonald’s coffee about the best option short of true coffee houses
I’m not so sure about that, they studied Starbucks’ quasi-monopoly for quite some time and then decided to beat them with better coffee.
So at least they had a plan, unlike KFC with their “me too” approach. That stuff is so bad I’ll rather risk headaches on a 10h flight than to refuel with that garbage.