Starbucks: healer of the planet?
July 7th, 2008 by Cliff Bostock in News, RestaurantsUndoubtedly, you’ve already heard that Starbucks will be closing 600 stores and has cut expansion plans way back.
If you want the full story of Starbucks’ troubles, check out the lengthy profile of returning CEO Howard Schultz in Portfolio magazine. The article says:
Schultz convinced people that Starbucks was the best coffee in the world and conferred cachet on anyone carrying a cup of it. He convinced them that Starbucks stores were latter-day settlement houses, a “third place” between home and work. He convinced them that Starbucks was healing a planet rent by waning faith in religion, politics, institutions, and corporations: Instead of bowling alone, they could come in and sip caramel macchiatos in company. (It was a neat trick, providing comfort and caffeine, a jolt and a caress, all at once.) He also convinced them that they could indulge themselves philanthropically. His coffee growers were well compensated, his workers content; as he regularly reminds people, Starbucks spends more annually on health insurance than on coffee beans. Why would employees need unions? They had him. Starbucks could be inescapable, homogenizing, and globalizing and still not be McDonald’s.
So far, Starbucks hasn’t released a list of stores that will be closed in Atlanta.
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