Starbucks Nation

Dan Neil
Los Angeles Times
April 1, 2007

I am writing this on my laptop from a wobbly wrought-iron café table sitting by a battered wood banquette in the back of the hippest, coolest, most damnably noncorporate coffeehouse that I know of in Los Angeles. Casbah, on Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake area—out-of-towners, just follow the smell of disdain—looks like it's been moved brick by brick from the souk in Marrakech, notwithstanding the anorexic teenagers in eyeliner. The place is chandeliered with hand-hammered Moroccan tin lamps. The menu is hand-painted on an antique mirror hanging behind the counter. There's a little boutique in back selling muslin blouses and hand-painted ceramic tagines. Don't know what a tagine is? Get out, OUT!—before we call the multicultural police.

Is this the Starbucks of the future?

The gist of Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz's memo to his fellow executives, leaked in February to the consternation of stockholders, was that Starbucks—the coffee goliath with more than 13,000 outlets in 39 countries —had sacrificed the "romance and theater" of the coffee-shop experience for efficiency and profit.

Confronted with lines going out the doors, the chain had introduced automatic espresso machines to replace the La Marzocco machines (Schultz misspelled it "La Marzocca," which only seemed to underscore his point). Instead of open bins full of fragrant coffee beans, the chain sells its coffee in vacuum-sealed bags like in a grocery store. Likewise, in the name of "efficiencies of scale," the store design had been regularized so that one Starbucks looks more or less like every other. The sites, Schultz lamented, "no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store."

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