Starbucks Schadenfreude

By Steve Poftak
July 7th, 2008

I’m not a huge fan of the place and I still consistently ask for a ‘medium’ instead of a ‘grande’ but I think the delight in the suffering of Starbucks is overdone.

The standard line is that Starbucks crushed all the mom and pop coffee shops. But the reality is something quite different:

57 percent of the nation’s coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses.

Starbucks expanded the entire market of coffee and implemented a strategy that smaller, more agile competitors have no problem competing against. Read the Slate story linked to above. Starbucks is by no means perfect, but let’s not overdo it.