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When Business Insider calls you basic, you may have an image problem.

With over 24,000 stores worldwide, itโ€™s safe to say that Starbucks is just about everywhere. But with this ubiquity comes the problem of seeming pedestrian. The brand that โ€œmade it OK to charge more than $2 for a cup of coffeeโ€ has lost some of its upscale luster and โ€œis now competing with chains like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s.โ€ Or as millennial alt-culture webzine Business Insider puts it, โ€œ[Starbucks] has gotten, in a sense, too basic.โ€

Being described as “basic” is probably a good indication that your brand isnโ€™t on trend, but being described as suchย by an article that has to define the term for itโ€™s presumably older demographic? Thatโ€™s damning. To be fair, the author uses the term โ€œcoffee snobโ€ a lot and cites an article from a blog called โ€œFashionistaโ€, so maybe the audience isnโ€™t the uncool part of this equation.

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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-storeโ€™s 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 brandโ€™s 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.

via Starbucks

The efficacy of these initiatives remains to be seen. Itโ€™s 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

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