Starbucks in the News
Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 3:48PM
Starbucks has been in the news a lot this last month. I don’t want to be accused of advertising for the company, but with 16,000 stores worldwide, the Seattle-based coffee giant is probably the most important coffee chain in the world. To ignore it would be doing you a disservice. After all, many cafés watch what Starbucks does very closely and then try to mimic or improve upon it. What starts in Starbucks may later be seen at your favorite local café.
VIA
At the beginning of the month, Starbucks released its flavored VIA instant coffee (available in vanilla, caramel, cinnamon spice and mocha). Yes, that’s right, the company who rose to prominence by educating customers about high-quality whole-bean coffee, now sells flavored instant coffee. Am I the only one who winces when he walks down the bulk coffee isle at the grocery store and gets a whiff of the caramel-flavored coffee sitting on the shelf? Some of those aromas are so strong they make my stomach queasy. The flavored VIA had better be nothing like those coffees. When I try it, I will let you know.
Mind you, I am not anti-instant coffee. If people want to drink instant coffee, that’s their business. One of the things one of our professors in business school told us was that if your product saves people money or if it saves them time, you have a winner. VIA does both. It’s cheaper than going to Starbucks to buy a mocha every day and drinking VIA is a lot quicker than stopping at a Starbucks too. In addition, as reported by the company, sixty percent of its customers drink flavored coffee and eleven percent of American households buy it. Maybe the company is onto something.