Earlier this month, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote a company memo that expressed concern over what he termed the "Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience." StarbucksGossip.com first posted the memo online and its authenticity was later confirmed by Starbucks, then picked up by more traditional media outlets.
The memo basically said that because of the rapid and wide-reaching expansion of the company, as well as the desire to do so quickly and efficiently, there has been a "watering down of the Starbucks experience." For example, switching to automatic espresso machines removed "much of the romance and theater that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines (the manual machines the stores used to have)." Another issue Schultz had was with the store designs, which have become too standard, too sterile and, in some cases, too distanced from actual coffee.
Speed and quality are important to any food service business, but not at the expense of experience of the customers' enjoyment and Shultz is proposing that they start making some changes to recapture that coffee shop experience that Starbucks first offered. There won't be a full-scale reversal in company strategy in pursuit of this goal. Instead, changes will be implemented gradually to move the stores away from the cookie-cutter, fast food chain genre while still chasing a larger global presence. Examples of this include having baristas measure out freshly roasted coffee beans, rather than having them in prepackaged bags, and changing the merchandise to have more coffee-centric merchandise, like grinders and brewers, instead of stuffed animals.
The changes planned for now seem small, but getting the aroma of freshly roasted beans back into the stores is a step in the right direction.
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