Brand Autopsy

"Starbucks' truest feedback channel is on the Starbucks Gossip blog."

John - what do you think accounts for this? Is it a lack of trust on the part of the employees, is it a lack of upward filter, or is it just the nature of the beast?

Matt … my experience working inside SBUX tells me there are just too many indirect paths to navigate to get direct feedback to the decision-makers. (That’s the nature of the beast for any $7B business operating over 11,000 units in nearly 40 countries.) And when direct input/feedback from store-level Baristas is received by entry-level and mid-level corporate employees, it is usually not acted upon. For example, the SBUX Product Team receives countless emails and vmails from energetic store-level baristas sharing new beverage ideas they’ve created and sold in-store. Problem is, those ideas are usually laughed at as being too inane or simply never championed upstream within the SBUX Product Team.

That’s why I say the Starbucks Gossip blog is the truest feed backchannel to Starbucks corporate decision-makers because it is 100% direct and 100% unfiltered. A Starbucks corporate decision-maker is more likely to read Starbucks Gossip to learn about new beverage concoctions created in-store than they are to hear about it from the entry-level beverage coordinator who is the person responsible for fielding such feedback.

In working with a lot of retail and service businesses throughout the years, it's interesting to listen to the manager from Starbucks write what almost every manager and employee say is their problem.

In those cases, as in most cases, upper management still doesn't want to hear it!

One reviewer of POUR YOUR HEART INTO IT points out that Howard, being from Brooklyn and later working out of New York, "failed to cross the bridge and discover Little Italy where they had been making lattes and cappuccinos for decades."

It suddenly occurred to me, not only did Scultz fail to discover Little Italy before he made his famous trip to Milan in 1983 as a Starbucks employee, but he actually contradicts himself in the book about America's intro to lattes and cappuccinos. Example: page 53 - his "first taste" of a caffe latte in Verona: "No one in America knows about this . . .etc." Then pages 58, 59: When he has his first "test run" of an espresso bar (April '84) "As far as I know, America was first introduced to caffe latte that morning."

Problem is, on pages 81-84 when he becomes associated with Dave Olsen to start Il Giornale, he gives the following background on Olsen: "In the Fall of 1974 he opened Cafe Allegro on an alley just opposite main entrance to UW campus. Few Americans knew the term caffe latte in those days. He made a similar drink and called it a cafe au lait." This was 10 years prior to his espresso experiment in downtown Seattle!

Did Schultz rewrite history in order to sell a book? That clearly wouldn't have been necessary. But there is an additional problem. I have a friend who worked at the University Village store in 1977 who has a story that similarly contradicts Schultz's timeline. He told me the following: "During our training at Starbucks they pulled out an espresso maker to show us how to make capuccinos (only to demo the machines since they weren't making drinks for sale). The person doing the demo started with more-or-less an apology - something like "foaming milk is hard to do and the goal is to just get the top of the drink completely covered with foam". Meanwhile I had discovered 2 espresso houses in Seattle (the Allegro and the Last Exit Off Broadway). They were making good lattes (then called café au-laits) with lots of foam. I realized that either our machines were merely toys, or the person giving the demo at Starbucks did not know how to properly foam milk. I went across the street to QFC, bought a gallon of milk, set up a machine in the shop, and proceeded to foam milk until I could do it the right way. It took most of the gallon to do it but I was able to produce 3 times the amount of foam (on a volume basis) as the milk I was using." This was in 1977, seven years before Schultz' test run of an espresso bar in downtown Seattle!

Interesting old-school tid-bits on SBUX. Thanks for sharing Stephen.

!TO ALL STARBUCKS EMPLOYEES! I have one simple request: please quit refering to yourselves as "baristas"! Do any of you know what a barista is? You are all giving real baristas, such as myself, a bad name. I would rather you all refer to yourselves as drink servers/pourers. That sounds a lot more like the actual tasks you perform. You all serve drinks, let me elaborate. You push a button! A BUTTON! That's it! Do know what a group head is? How about a tamp? No...didn't think so. These are the tools of the barista.

Most of us baristas try not to overextract our espresso shots. Well, I'm not blaming anything on you drink pourers. I'm just stating the fact that you don't have to do anything to produce a good shot of espresso. I'm not talking about a shot that tastes okay and makes a coffee flavored drink, I'm talking about a shot that us baristas like to call a "god shot". A shot of espresso anyone would be pleased with. It's composed of the perfect grind, the right amount of tamping pressure, it pours like fresh Guniess from the tap and tastes like the nectar of gods! So to all of you drink pourers posing to be baristas, dream on or join your local coffee house that makes real espresso. Only then will you be granted the name barista!

We only recently became drink pourers. It wasn't many years ago that we still used the real machines. We had tamps, knock bars, group heads, etc. The reason for the transition is because we got way to busy and people started suffering from repetitive stress syndrome. Without the button pushing our task would be next to impossible. It's unfortunate that it makes you bitter. Peace.

I'm not bitter, Starbuck's coffee is bitter. The point of writing was this: Starbucks makes other coffee shops look bad. I am sick of customers standards being lowered by a corporation that lost their original purpose: sell a premium espresso beverage at a premium price. The drink has become burnt in taste but the premium price remains. I just think that Starbucks has done its job of globalizing the addiction of coffee but, they have turned people onto a product in which they believe to be "good", but in all actuallity, is a poor product tainting the tongues of many. It's not by any means the fault of the "drink pourers" but, these people shouldn't throw around the word barista so freely! If you all are baristas and I call myself a barista, then this implies that starbucks employees are on the same level as I am and that is what bothers me. I don't bust my hump everyday to be compared to a starbucks drink pourer. I am as busy as starbucks is in the local market and sometimes I go home with a bruise on the palm of my hand from tamping so much espresso, but my company doesn't go out and buy automatic machines so I can mass-produce poop in a cup. I just really don't like starbucks and the image it presses on all baristas.