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Is Malaise Brewing at Starbucks?
"Starbucks does not define the coffee conversation anymore," Bullock said. "It is defined by independents like Victrola.
"Look at the baristas!" he continued, pointing to the intense women on the business side of the espresso machine. "This is a calling, what they do, like an old-school European barber. This is not pulling fries out of the vat when the thing beeps at you. With these old machines, you run the risk of variability in every cup. But sometimes you get art."
  "Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter," Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said. (By Bill Pugliano -- Getty Images) |
In the Feb. 14 memo to his executives, Schultz sounded as if he and Bullock had been hanging out together at Victrola:
"We achieved fresh roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost?" Schultz wrote. "The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage."
Heritage schmeritage.
That is the cold judgment of Deborah Esposito, who drinks her double-tall soy lattes with a half shot of vanilla at Fuel, another successful independent coffee shop in Seattle.
"Look, you can't run 13,000 shops like you can run a place like Fuel," said Esposito, 44, whose one-person software company, Mirror-doc, helps business owners customize Microsoft Word. "That is a choice Schultz made. How big do you want to be? How rich do you want to be?"
Schultz is not the founder of Starbucks but the visionary behind its expansion; he has said he wants to triple the footprint of the company, with more than 40,000 stores worldwide. In his recent memo, though, he does not explain how world domination in specialty coffee squares with getting "back to the core" of the soulful Seattle coffee shop.
Those soulful shops, by the way, continue to proliferate in Seattle -- and many prosper, even while surrounded on all sides by Starbucks.
One such newcomer in West Seattle is called Freshy's, which Amber Bennett, 31, opened a year and a half ago. It has a pinball machine, free Wi-Fi and lots of face time with Amber, who is blonde, attractive and works in the shop 12 hours a day, six days a week. She says that employees from nearby Starbucks regularly come over to Freshy's for coffee, which she makes on an old, all-manual Italian espresso machine.
"I have baristas from Starbucks coming here, looking for a job and saying they have 'coffee experience,' " Bennett said. "But at Starbucks, all they know how to do is push the buttons on the automatic machines."
