Starbucks’ Identity Crisis
At last, a powerhouse competitor has challenged the market dominance of the corporate coffee colossus, Starbucks. The name of the upstart competitor? Starbucks.
Well, actually, you won’t find the corporate name on the challenger, and that’s the point. With its own sales declining as more and more caffeine consumers reject the cookie-cutter corporate climate that the coffee chain epitomizes, Starbucks is launching a new line of stores that jettisons its own brand – no Starbucks sign outside, no logos inside, and none of that generic blandness that makes each Starbucks store just like the 16,000 others in the chain.
The new shops strive to be the anti-Starbucks, with funky stylings and localized names that disguise the corporate presence behind them. The idea, says Starbucks’ senior vice president of global design, is to give the stores “a community personality.”
This is, of course, a deliberate consumer fraud, but it’s also so clumsy and transparent that it’s doomed to be an embarrassing failure. Start with the fact that genuine coffee shops already have “a community personality” – and one thing none of them has is a senior vice president of global design.
Corporate chains can’t do “community,” can’t do “funky,” can’t do “cool,” can’t do “independent” – because they’re not. One clue into Starbucks’ inherent lack of cool came last year when it surreptitiously deployed a gaggle of market researchers into local Seattle coffee shops to gather intelligence on what constitutes “community personality.” The spies didn’t exactly fit in – on each of their forays, they arrived as a group, poked around, jotted notes in folders labeled “Observation,” and then left without even buying a single cup of coffee!
Starbucks can hide its name but not its corporate nature.
Right-Wing Loopiness
If you want to take a stomach-churning ride on a loop-the-loop, you don’t have to go to the state fair – just plug in to the loony attacks right-wingers have launched against Barack Obama’s health care reform plan.
You’ll shriek as they take you on astonishing flights of fantasy. For example, did you know that the diabolical Obama is a secret socialist who is plotting a full-scale government takeover of health care, including putting Medicare under government control?
Far more blood-curdling, though, is what right-wingers have uncovered in the president’s reform legislation. Buried on page 425 of the bill is a demonic, bone-chilling provision to create a federal “death panel,” which will be empowered to kill old folks and people with disabilities. Impossible, you scoff? Well, none other than Sarah Palin says it’s so. The elderly and incapacitated, Palin recently revealed, “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system,” concluded the sainted Sarah, “is downright evil.”
Indeed it is, and it would terrify us all – if one iota of Palin’s statement were true.
Luckily, it’s not. The provision on page 425 has nothing to do with a “death panel.” It simply promotes the common sense idea that folks should have “living wills” and other advance instructions for how they choose to be treated when their inevitable time of death approaches. This end-of-life provision didn’t even come from Obama or a Democrat. It was put into the bill by Johnny Isakson – a Republican, pro-life senator from Georgia. Isakson says that Palin’s interpretation of the provision is “nuts.”
But on the right-wing loop-the-loop, such realities are not allowed to interfere with a good political ride.
This article appears in August 28 • 2009.