Star-Big-Bucks $$$
STARBUCK'S HIT A STUMBLING BLOCK Starbucks has hit a planning stumbling block here in the city. The American coffee giant, who are opening their first store in the Dundrum Shopping Centre, were planning to turn a building on College Green into their flagship store here. However, objectors have put their spoke in saying that the Seattle-based company would "dumb down" an historic part of the city.
Dublin 98fm www.98fm.ie 18.08.2005
Starbucks is coming to Ireland…
The North American market is saturated, so they need to find new territories to conquer…I remember the last time I was in Vancouver, loads of the shops I knew and liked had closed down and were all becoming Starbucks. Want coffee? Well, you’ll have to go to Starbucks, all the other places are gone. Nevermind that it is the McDonald’s of coffee, i.e. not-so-good, relatively expensive products, served by underpaid staff in a stressful standardised environment.
Starbucks also brag their ethical approach and action, showing an oh-so-perfect image of a people and environment-oriented company, blessed with social values. It all conceals a much more predatory reality. Starbucks’ policy is one of saturation, seeking out competitors in the urban space and building in close proximity to them. Such competitors (non-corporate, independent businesses) are soon driven from the market, crushed by Starbucks economies of scale. Once competition is eradicated, Starbucks move on to other places, and reproduce the same pattern again (Wal-Mart kinda practices). While our economy model should encourage competition, it actually doesn’t give it a chance and allows such companies to be in a near monopolistic situation. Starbucks go as far as going to their competitor’s landlords and offering them much bigger rents, driving the small cafés out of their spaces and out of business (Klein N., 2001, No Logo).
Worse than that, the Haidabucks case proves that Starbucks are not only interested in wiping out their direct competitors, their arrogance and greed leads them to just want to show their exclusivity and domination, and scare everybody out of trying to resist, thanks to a bunch of highly paid lawyers. Read about the case carefully… Suing a small restaurant in a village of 700 for daring to use the suffix Bucks, while Starbucks themselves got their name from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is just too unbelievable to be true. And yet it is.
So it is with great pleasure that I learn that Starbucks are now taking on the Irish market. Watch out independent, friendly, unpretentious cafés, you’re gonna be in trouble soon.
I hope they’ll abandon that College Street idea, Irish historic legacy vs. paper-cup coffee chain… Why not put a Starbucks flag on the moon, just to make sure they’ve got it all?
Brought to you by Sandrine @ 11:38 am
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