Following on from the recent US closures, a significant withdrawal from the Australian market was announced yesterday.
Apparently Starbucks hasn’t turned a profit since establishing in Australia in 2000.
That’s because they’re crap.
And we already had milkshake shops.
Good?
Oh, I know. I’m just surprised that it took so long for the penny to drop. When your core product - your coffee - is worse than that of all the other established businesses, you don’t have much chance.
Starbucks admitted as much:
Don’t get me wrong - I’m sorry that the business has failed and I’m crossing fingers and everything else that the employees get snapped up by other employers soon - I really do. Just probably don’t list Starbucks on your resume, unless you’re applying to that other atrocious franchise … Gloria Jeans.
There’s only 84 in all of Australia? We passed 100 a long time ago.
I’m wondering why they expanded so quickly in the first place!
Their coffee is bloody expensive too!
Give me my $3.00 coffee at the cafe below my work any day 
I think that answers Siam Sam’s query ‘only 84’. Because of the post WWII immigration boom, Australia has been fortunate enough to be populated with a rich tapesty of Greek, Italian, Turkish etc cultures, all of whom brought with them the ‘real way to do coffee’. I’m with you threnodyangelfire, give me my little (family run) cafe for a decent brew over a franchise any day. And give it to me in Melbourne, or that heavenly cup of black Dimatina coffee from the cafe on the highway at Anglesea. Why is Dimatina coffee so hard to find anyway?
What, it took you guys 8 years to drive Starbucks out? Amateurs. We did it in under 2.
Prolly cause lots of us still drink tea! You ask for tea in a Starbucks and they look at you like you’ve asked for two year old human liver pate on a biscuit. 
Therefore, those youngsters coming up in the ranks wanted to drink coffee from the shop they saw in the movies and the soaps - dammit - they played on our rollover to American culture.
I dunno, Canada’s national hot bevvy is tea, and Starbucks still managed to gain a foothold here. We had a well-established coffee scene, too.
Maybe there’s hope yet, though. I hope so, there’s been plenty of times lately when Starbucks is the only available coffee, bought out of desperation and then poured down the stormdrain for really being as unpotable as I remembered it.
The two or three times I popped into a Starbucks here in Melbourne AU, the joint was jumping, but was filled with international students from the university.
Now we’ve coffee-snob-snubbed Starbucks maybe it’s time to ban Gloria Jeans. The crayons dipped in scalding hot saliva that they call caffe lattes are an affront to everything I believe in.
Add Lebanese to that lot. Yes, I’m surprised that Starbucks didn’t do a bit of market research before entering the Australian market. Or perhaps they thought Australians were sick of Mediterranean-style coffee, and wanted West Coast US coffee instead.
But Australia is a country which forced McDonalds to add beetroot to its hamburgers ( http://blogs.smh.com.au/sit/archives/2007/11/retreats_we_wont_be_beaten.html ), so they should have realised that Australia s not a carbon copy of the US.
(And the beetroot in burgers is not a Mediterranean thing, but predates the postwar immigration into Australia).
Ahhhh yes Giles! You know what we say here in Oz - You can beat an egg but you can’t beat a …
Coffee for me: black. I’ve never had a coffee from Starbucks. I don’t know if they even serve just a “normal” black cup of coffee, do they? If so it probably costs 3 times what I’m prepared to pay.
Yeah.
I am happy to say I never set foot in one of those places. I did go to a Gloria Jean’s last year, because I was with others. It sucked.
We Australians can be boorish cultural philistines with the best of 'em, but as mentioned upthread, we have a huge Mediterranean population here, and enough knowledge has rubbed off on even the most boring and suburban of us that coffee isn’t about a bucket of mud-coloured hot water.
Cafe Sport on Norton Street, Leichhardt (Sydney’ Little Italy) was where I got my best ever cup of coffee.
The contrast between cultures is interesting. Australia already had lots of good coffee, so Starbucks didn’t bring anything to the market.
Here in the United States, before Starbucks, it was impossible to get coffee that wasn’t made from stale beans and scorched on the hot plate.
Sure it was - you just had to know where to go to get it. We had our small coffee shops, our press pots, our own Mediterrianian coffee culture. There were small batch roasters - quite possibly more of them (Starbucks drove a lot of them out of business). What Starbucks did was popularize a fairly medicore cup of coffee.