swagvalance

Starbucks Improves as Restaurants Slowly Regain Their Appetite

Go Starbucks. A 6% decline in same store sales, and that's supposedly a positive story.

Facebook Brands with Fans: Starbucks Tops Coke

Well, a lot of good that has done them -- seeing that Starbucks just posted a 6% decline in sales this past quarter and an 8% decline in sales the previous quarter.

Green Mountain Coffee: Roasting Shorts on the Way to $100

Worse, I don't like the coffee -- let alone the K-Cup format, which seems cynically designed in the 1990s for maximum environmental waste.

Starbucks Lacks Direction and Soul

Starbucks invited the fast food chain competition years ago. Now it will eat them alive.

Apple: Like Starbucks and Whole Foods, A Trend That's Past Its Prime

I'm with you on the iPhone. You lost me on the Dell.

Apple: Like Starbucks and Whole Foods, A Trend That's Past Its Prime

With you on the iPhone thing. But you lost me on the Dell thing.

Starbucks Still Brewing Growth

Agreed with their CFO's comment a week or so ago. Either the data is faulty or someone is being deliberately deceptive. Neither bodes well for the company.

Is Starbucks a Bargain? It Almost Goes Without Saying

Competitors, such as Tully's and Peet's, are making profits quarter after quarter while Starbucks blames the economy. That level of disingenuous behavior right there is a red flag.

Furthermore, Starbucks has placed itself out of the quality market. They are now a numbers game that has to compete with the likes of McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. The sheen of an elite product is now off their brand (after all, they have dumbed down their production and staff skills so much to keep stores opening that their baristas could not even quality for a barista competition), with independents and smaller chains carrying that forward.

In the process, Starbucks has essentially lost its identity. It's been a decade since they've been relevant to the best coffee available, and they must refashion themselves for retail warfare in the trenches with fast-food giants and the Wal-Marts of the world.

They can survive if they refashion their identity to compete in this new climate. But if they do not -- if they hold on to the mistaken belief that competitors haven't long passed them by in quality and they have set themselves on a course never to return there -- they are doomed to continual failure. Suffering is the avoidance of necessary pain. I'm still waiting for Starbucks to face these truths and confront that necessary pain if they are to ever recover.

Starbucks: Two Years of Missteps and an Overdue Admission

I have to believe Ken G is being disingenuous here when he writes, "you cannot find better espresso, cappucino, lattes, or coffee anywhere else". Maybe compared to Starbucks' fast-food bretheren, but therein lies the rub: that is precisely what they've become.

The quality mantra has been Starbucks party line for decades. Problem is, and Schultz has even admitted it, the company sold out its market leadership in quality to chase after store growth at all costs. And that meant spending the past decade automating everything they did well to use push-button vending machine-style espresso machines, enabling them to hire lesser and lesser skilled baristas to keep the doors open on these exploding number of shops, etc. Meanwhile, the competition has eaten away all their credibility at the quality end: Peet's, Tully's, Caribou, and an armada of new independents that run circles around all of the big chains.

The result? There are annual barista competitions all over the world, and yet not a single Starbucks barista can even compete -- because their dumbed-down equipment and dumbed-down hiring standards to operate it prevent it from even being possible.

Starbucks cannot trumpet the "quality" line anymore without sounding as hollow as their investor relations materials.