Coffee City
Melissa Allison tracks Seattle's — and the world's — caffeine addiction.
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Did Starbucks traffic fall because it lost cachet? Or was it just early to the recession?
Posted by Melissa Allison
Following a deluge of books about Starbucks, a new title that's not strictly about the coffee giant has emerged with a seemingly simple idea: "The most successful products offer either convenience, which includes attractive pricing, or 'fidelity,' which means high quality and cachet," Lisa Von Ahn of Reuters writes.
In "Trade-Off" (Broadway, $23), former USA Today writer Kevin Maney argues that, "In the late 1990s, Starbucks epitomized cool, and people were willing to endure long lines for its pricey coffee concoctions. But when it expanded aggressively, the Starbucks experience began to look rather mundane," Von Ahn writes.
Is that why Starbucks' traffic into U.S. stores started declining in 2007, when the economy was still expanding? Or did lattes just take a hit before everything else, making Starbucks a leading economic indicator as Seeking Alpha and Jonathan Last at the Philadelphia Inquirer have suggested? (And which Safeway CEO Steven Burd's comments yesterday reinforce?)
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