Why people get so upset about losing their neighborhood Starbucks

Columnist Rod Dreher explains: "Starbucks is an iconic brand that means something more than just a company. It's become a sign of middle-class American modishness. To get a Starbucks in your neighborhood meant that you were validated, in some sense. For Starbucks to leave means that your part of town, in terms of social psychology, is downwardly mobile. That, I think, is what most rattles folks about losing their Starbucks, even if they rarely went there. It's a status thing." (Read the Dallas Morning News post)

Comments

[beachbound]

oh no. you'll have to drive 3 more minutes to another starbucks.

[Ben Atkin]

He hit the nail on the head. "Downwardly mobile". It's partly the loss of a feature of their home (close to a Starbucks) that often shows up on Real Estate listings and partly the hole left by a store closing.

[michelle]

I love Starbucks as much as the next person, but in my suburb (of Seattle) there are two grocery stores with Starbucks inside AND a Starbucks store next to it. Who did that? The in-store ones are newer and I realize that they're not corporate-run stores, but still... It's overload.

[Elizabeth Marshall]

Thanks for using the picture from our protest event on Saturday in support of the Lower Greenville Ave Starbucks #6262 in Dallas, Texas.

To reply to "beachbound's" comments, we won't simply go to another Starbucks 3 minutes down the road if this location ends up closing. We are fighting for this location not because we want a McStarbucks like the ones in the grocery store, but because we actually have a wonderful neighborhood coffee shop and hangout. It just so happens to serve Starbucks. We can walk to our Starbucks and we have more regulars and super-regulars at this location that any I know (and I've visited many all over the country).

I completely understand that Starbucks has to shut down some locations. But, not this one. Our Starbucks has been here for 9 years and it truly models what Howard Schultz and the Starbucks team claim to want - a vital neighborhood community and a "Third Place."

If Starbucks proceeds with their plan to shut this store, they may not only lose a lot of customers, but many of us may give up on Starbucks completely and support a local store, which is what we tend to do in my neighborhood anyways. We won't simply "roll over, play dead" and take all our business to the store 3 minutes down the street. While we are super-regulars at this store, we may decide to not even be regulars if we are forced to go to a McStarbucks down the road.

Check out our campaign here:

http://www.savelowergreenvillestarbucks.com

[P.R.I.D.E.]

McStarbucks? Do you realize the audience you are writing to on this thread?

I totally agree with and commend your efforts, but your post here reads like a slap in the face. I visited your site and was truly inspired, until I read your post here. What gives?

[Elizabeth Marshall]

Mea culpa!

I wrote my post in haste and didn't consider the implications of using such a term. BELIEVE ME - I have been a Starbucks regular since 1997 and truly enjoy many of the locations I visited. I used that term, McStarbucks, as a sarcastic way of saying that neither baristas NOR regulars want a sterile coffee shop that has no sense of community and that by destroying our Lower Greenville location, Starbucks Corporate is sending the message that they want Starbucks locations that are more transient and more transactional - in essence, creating a McStarbucks out of a wonderful concept and culture that I've supported for over 10 years.

Again, I have the utmost respect for PRIDE and all the other baristas I know. My comment was directed toward the intentions of corporate and whether they are serious about creating community stores.

My sincere and heartfelt apologies to P.R.I.D.E.

Humbly,

Elizabeth

[truth]

Please with all the pontification. Really.

If you ask any sbux staffer to name their #1 competitor and they will reply "McDonalds".

That's why sbux believes they need to transform. Today's experience at one company's store is a re-skinned version of the other. Generally speaking, of course.

I prefer the "Buck-Donalds" handle, myself. It's a tip of the hat to the dear departed leader.

[P.R.I.D.E.]

Elizabeth- your apology is accepted and thank you for the clarification. I understand now where you were coming from-and I appreciate how, from a customer's perspective, you highlight the difference between us, and our transactional competitors. That is what we work so hard for, day in and day out, so its nice to know that there are customers like you who support our sense of community. It makes it all worth it.

Best Regards,
P.R.I.D.E.

Personal
Responsibility
In
Delivering
Excellence

[Cat Tiger!]

I think the 'blurb' comment to this article was extremely insightful - there is a sense of loss of 'solid' class status with the departure of a starbucks. On the other hand, I think that the blurb just as aptly provides the ready explanation for why these departures are occurring: "even if they rarely went there".

Regardless of the psychic benefit that you might get from your local coffee shop, if you don't support it, it's not going to remain in place. And, in circular fashion, this justifies the notion that perhaps the areas that are losing starbucks were never really capable of supporting them in the first plcae. The cold hard reality is that it takes a certain socioeconomic group - or combination of socioeconomic groups - to support a chain that sells coffee for $2.x, blended drinks for $4-$5.x, and esp. based drinks for something inbetween.

Doesn't necessarily have to be 'white, wealthy, soccer mom' to keep a bux afloat (although those help). But you have to have people with sufficient disposable income and a desire to spend it at the location. Upper-middle class families, youth, shifft workers, business lunch crowd, etc.

I know there's been some great success with the 'urban experience' (Johnson) stores - I frequent one (although somehow they managed to put an 'urban experience' store in an extremely wealthy area of the city ... not sure how the lawyers managed that one!). My point being, if you can bring the community into the store and fashion the experience appropriately, that counts as a 'group' capable of supporting the store as well.

But to just plop these stores down wherever - and that's what it sounds like they were doing, particularly in the last 12 months of their period of maximum expansion - will be a non-starter. The closings bear this out

[Tiger Cat]

FYI - there was an article in the wsj today calling into question McD's whole coffee expansion strategy. Or, more precisely, expressing the street's growing concern over whether the rollout is actually working. Lots of anecodtal evidence that, particularly in this economy, stores don't want to spend the necessary capital to do the whole 'mccafe conversion' so they're just purchasing the machines and slapping the drinks up on the menu. Whoever designed the rollout for McD's must have had a heart attack when he started to hear stories like that. I think there's a significant portion of the McD franchise base that really doesn't 'get it' in that they can't offer an experience if they only place the item on the menu.

More generally, although McDs is a titan in the food service industry, I have a suspicion that their sotre and managementt culture, their customer demographic, and their in-store atmosphere are all going to contribute to a less than stellar outcome with this espreso push. Take note, I don't beleive that 'less expensive' necessarily implies 'destined for failure'. I think Dunkin has done a stellar job of pushing themselves into the espresso area of the coffee market, even though they don't really offer a 3rd place experience. They have the appropriate culture to be able to authentically hawk coffee. McD's? I'm guessing not so much.

Not to say that McD won't continue this push and not to say that espresso drinks won't find a place on their menu probably on a permanent basis. They will (the big marketing campaigns haven't even started) and the drinks will likely be around to stay. But they wanted more than a menu augmentation - they wanted a new lead segment. And I doubt that's going to happen. I forsee more obscurity than 'lead product' over the next 10 years.

[Ken]

I mean, really. Its a coffee shop. If a starbucks closes, go to another. I have never really understood what drives people to a Starbucks instead of a smaller, local place? The coffee is almost never better, Starbucks tend to be noisey, without a lot of comfortable places to sit, why does it have to be a starbucks you hang out at? Is it just brand loyalty?

[P.R.I.D.E.]

Ken, that's kind of like saying that "Cheers" was just a bar. I can see how, if a visitor came through the Cheers bar, they may think "what the big deal", however it iss those who come in regularly who get the sense of community that is offered in some of our stores. I say some, not all...

[Tall Drip]

"I mean, really. Its a coffee shop. If a starbucks closes, go to another. I have never really understood what drives people to a Starbucks instead of a smaller, local place?"

For some, there are few "smaller, local places," and those that do exist are often inconvenient. There's a smaller local place that I could go to on my lunch hour, but it's not convenient. There's metered parking, and it's hard to find a spot. Meanwhile, just a little drive away, there's a Starbucks with no-hassle, free parking. Advantage - Starbucks. That's work - near my home, there are no indie stores to speak of, but quite a few Starbucks locations to choose from.

[truth]

@Pride: You've obviously never been to the Cheers bar.

And if you are talking about the TV version, well, you might want to come back to reality, because TV ain't real.

Indy shops = inconvenient. That's another PR lie.

[Ken]

P.R.I.D.E.
I understand your point, but I guess I just don't see coffee shops as a hang out, like a bar. I might meet someone for coffee, sit, and chat for a bit, but I would never hang out at a coffee shop for hours. Do people really do that? And if they do, my point would be the same, Starbucks I go to here in Arizona rarely have any comfortable seating, and are always very loud. When the small, local shop down the road has a guy playing guitar on the patio, big comfy chairs, and some really friendly people folks behind the counter. The Starbucks has a few metal chairs, and if you sit outside, you are sucking exhaust fumes from the cars waiting in the DT. I don't see how a Starbucks closing its doors, when there is a choice of locally run coffee shops to choose from is a big deal at all.
I don't see Starbucks as much as a bar, its more like a liquor store to me. I don't hang out at liquor stores, I hang out in bars.

[that_girl]

i just moved to a new suburb of chicago which, astonishingly, has no starbucks. and i almost wish there were one. the nearest one is a town over in a busy strip mall with a drive-through and looked very non-loungey the one time i went by. i prefer local coffeehouses, but we only have one of those, which is also a polish restaurant, and it's in a weird area.

my point... who said i had a point? :) i guess my point is, while i prefer a local place with big comfy chairs and a stack of books to read and so forth, i'd prefer a starbucks over nothing. and in a lot of towns, that's all they have; either the indie place never existed or they couldn't survive.

[Hopefully not closing]

This is in response to TRUTH:

I am sorry that you have not experienced the so-called 'third place' at starbucks. Of course people hang out there! I have been with the co for 2 years and just recently transferred to a brand new store (2 months brand new to be exact), and now they are planning to close our store within the next 9 months. What a waste! Our store is huge (the largest one in my city), has comfy chairs and friendly baristas, and so much potential. I live to see my regulars (some of which followed me there from my old store) and everyone loves the new store.. but we haven't even had a grand opening yet and they are planning to shut us down b/c business isn't up to par with the other stores in the area. We need time to get off the ground.. I sure wish corporate wouldn't have put us on the darn list.

There is a difference between Starbucks and indie shops.. I've been in both as a customer and employee, and although indie shops may have a good atmosphere, the love for coffee and the training aren't as in-depth.

[Hopefully not closing]

Correction, above comment was addressed to Ken. And just the forum in general.

[truth]

@hopefully- You should get out and experience the coffee world a bit before making broad generalizations that indy shop quality isn't as good as sbux.

There are a whole bunch of indy shops that won't even interview sbux employees because they are 'button pushers'.

Both are stereotypes and both are wrong.

And if sbux was so determined to have people hang out, they would have free WiFi.

Sorry your store is closing, though.

[Cat Goat!!!]

I love a great indie shop - absolutely do. But I think that three things need to be emphasized (and, in this era of 'starbucks under seige' these are things that tend to be UNDERemphasized or brushed over in the discussion of comparative advantages and benefits)

#1. Indie quality can vary tremendously, town to town, area to area, and, to be honest, even day to day. This is the old tune of the mass market, but it's true in my extensive experience: you trade the possibility of reaching a 10/10 for the consistency of being able to hit a 7/10 on a daily basis by going to Starbucks. Because the other side of that indie 10/10 is a 4/10. And most people are risk averse in a technical sense: we'd rather have consistency than a mixture of wonderful and awful experiences.

#2. Indie availability is overstated (not even factoring in whether they're good or bad shops). I feel like the indie scene pushes this image that in every small town there's an indie shop and in any larger (say, over 20,000) town, there's going to be at least a handful of indies. Not so by a long shot. I've been to towns of 40 and 50k that -- apparently to the shock of the indie coffee scene -- lacked a shop. Or else their 'shop' was really nothing more than a coffee cart or a gas station masquerading a coffee place.

#3. Similar to quality, price can vary widely at indies. No matter how much wealthstock you have, you get to a certain point where you feel ridiculous at some of these places. In a town where we have a summer home (location: middle of nowhere USA) there's an excellent indie shop: it gets those 9/10s and 10/10s more frequently than I anticipated. However, you can only buy so many $6.xx large lattes and $3.xx pieces of bakery before you start to feel like an asshole (or idiot) for frequenting. And they know there's nothing to do about it because they're the only game in town.

(This isn't to discount the indie experiences which offer a SUPERIOR value to Starbucks - they're certainly out there as well - but I want to highlight the variability of the whole enterprise).

It's those 3 things: availability, consistency of product quality, and consistency in pricing that really have allowed chains in general but starbucks in particular (in the coffee context) to do so well. The coffee connoseiurs in any town that's losing its Starbucks will be thinking about all 3 of those things. I doubt they're going to be having many happy thoughts.

[ex-sbuxmanager]

We live in a country where over half the eligible population did not vote in the last presidential election even though we were in the middle of an ill-conceived, poorly planned war; even though gas prices jumped from an average of $1.52 in 2000 to an average of $2.08 in 2004; even though we thoroughly mis-managed the situations in Nigeria, Somalia, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and others. Even through all that, more than half of the eligible population did not even vote. People will skip voting if it rains.

But close a Starbucks, and all of the sudden people remember they have "rights" and the outrage appears.

I weep for our future.

[Tall Drip]

"Indy shops = inconvenient. That's another PR lie. "

All right, man, whatever you say....I guess you know my own town better than I do. lol

[ken]

to Hopefully not closing

You said "and although indie shops may have a good atmosphere, the love for coffee and the training aren't as in-depth. "

Now this I really disagree with. The Starbucks I go to hire mostly high school and college kids, and have NO coffee knowledge whatsoever. If you ask them anything about coffee, they pretty much repeat whatever is on the label, and thats about all. Most wouldn't know how to manually pull a shot if thier mothers life depended on it, and have as much passion for coffee as I do hair on my head (I'm a bald guy, just so you know).
Now, I understand all Starbucks are not the same (isn't that the point of a chain though?) But to say starbucks has more passion and knowledge for coffee is like saying WNBA fans are more passionate the cubs fans, it might be true for all 8 WNBA fans out there, but doesn't hold true to the rest of the country.

[joss]

1st, a Starbucks cup has all the cache of a Prada bag, but seems cheap enough to make people think they can afford it.

2nd, having a Starbucks IS validating. A Starbucks "coming soon" meant your neighborhood was on the way up; a starbucks leaving certainly suggests it is on its way down. Since this current economic upheaval is rooted in real estate, it's understandably unsettling to see yours leave. When they call the stores "underperforming," they aren't talking about the employees: they're talking about the customers.

3rd, Starbucks is Titanic in that it was believed impossible to fail and so any evidence to the contrary is really going to freak people out. Closing 600 stores seems like a harbinger of economic doom.

4th, as the company that couldn't help but grow, a Starbucks cup was like a token, a talisman, of financial success: something to be carted around in the hopes that it would rub off some of its glow on you. Depending on how Starbucks fairs after retreating from failing neighborhoods, it might take on some tarnish.

[Ken]

"2nd, having a Starbucks IS validating. "

I disagree, I think it WAS validation, now its means as much as a McDonalds, Burger King, or Subway moving in. At this time, I don't think Starbucks carries much more meaning then a Dairy Queen opening up.

[Jamie]

I don't feel any different about a cup from Starbucks than I do about a cup from Dunkin Donuts. Maybe if I were making $8 an hour I'd need my coffee cup to validate my existence.

Despite these rocky few months, Howard Schultz remains positive about the future of Starbucks. The job cuts and store closures will help make Starbucks stronger according to Schultz.

[Belle]

Ken, I know that I don't view a new Sbux location as any big deal, but then again, I have 4 Starbucks locations within a 2 mile radius of my home--and another 2 locations within about a slightly larger radius. No matter where I am in my local area, a Starbucks isn't more than a couple of miles away.

With that said, I can see that in areas where Starbucks hasn't become that saturated, getting a store can be a big deal. Even now, it can be a community having achieved a certain status. It's an opportunity to experience what other communities (like mine) take for granted, and I can see that it could represent that "upscale" lifestyle. In that case, I can completely understand how a community might feel the loss of that location would be a blow--both to the economy and the local psyche.