When Business Insider calls you basic, you may have an image problem.
With over 24,000 stores worldwide, itโs safe to say that Starbucks is just about everywhere. But with this ubiquity comes the problem of seeming pedestrian. The brand that โmade it OK to charge more than $2 for a cup of coffeeโ has lost some of its upscale luster and โis now competing with chains like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s.โ Or as millennial alt-culture webzine Business Insider puts it, โ[Starbucks] has gotten, in a sense, too basic.โ
Being described as “basic” is probably a good indication that your brand isnโt on trend, but being described as suchย by an article that has to define the term for itโs presumably older demographic? Thatโs damning. To be fair, the author uses the term โcoffee snobโ a lot and cites an article from a blog called โFashionistaโ, so maybe the audience isnโt the uncool part of this equation.
Either way, with the rise in popularity of specialty coffee around the world, Starbucks is taking steps to reinvent themselves as a high-end coffee experience. Most of the initiatives involve moving away from the mega-storeโs original modeling after a traditional Italian espresso bar and into more third wave cafe territory. Things like pour-overs, flat whites, and nitro cold brew have all been introduced into select stores in an attempt to provide the super premium experience Starbucks is hoping to achieve.
Other steps are a bit more unique, though, like the creation of Upstanders, Starbucksโ first go at creating original content. And of course there is the Roastery in Seattle, the brandโs decadent behemoth of a coffee showroom. With Roasteries in New York and Shanghai already in the works, Starbucks is hoping the super-premium cafes will have a trickle down effect for all their locations, as seen in the infographic below.
The efficacy of these initiatives remains to be seen. Itโs hard to imagine a person that frequents a specialty shop opting to go to Starbucks now just because they have pour-over and nitro cold brew, two things they could most likely get at their regular coffee stop. But maybe it will win them back some folks that converted to Dunkinโ Donuts. At the very least, it is familiarizing the general public with things like pour-over (and the associated price hike that comes with handmade single-serve coffee), reducing the slope of the specialty coffee learning curve for the oft-intimidated newbie. And that is undoubtedly a good thing for the industry as a whole.
Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
*all images via Starbucks