Is Starbucks here to stay? Is the coffee bar going to be a permanent part of the American landscape? Is this a moment similar to the birth of McDonald’s (fast food culture) in the '60s?
Or is this a passing fad that we’ll think back on as distinctively '00s in 20 or 30 years?
I think it’s a permanent change. Starbucks, and all the coffee bars that have been created in its wake, serve multiple useful fuctions. They’re places to meet friends and talk, places to work or study, and a place that people too young for bars can hang out.
I agree. I was skeptical about 20 years ago when I couldn’t understand why people would pay $2 for a cup of coffee. Now it’s more like $4, and its still pretty outrageous. But there’s more to it than just coffee. I go to Starbucks or Tully’s etc. about twice a week, sometimes for food. Thats alot more than I go to fast food restaurants. These coffee joints seem pretty entrenched.
Oddly enough I’ve never been inside of a Starbucks in my entire life.
I can see the idea of a place to meet, but several local bookstore have independent coffee bars in them.
No need for [del]Bigbucks[/del] [del]Fatbuck’s[/del] Starbucks.
But no other company has the penetration of Starbucks. I live in West L.A. and there are about five within a mile or so of my apartment. They do serve passable, if not great, coffee. Even if they provide a manufactured, pseudo-cool, boilerplate atmosphere, it’s still way better than the days when “coffeeshop” meant a Denny’s.
Even here where I live, in suburban Cleveland, there’s four within about 2km of my house.
Here to stay, I think. They’ve still got a long way to go before they get national market saturation; they’re still not common in many non-trendy small cities. In large cities, Starbucks is everywhere in white-collar areas, but hard to find in more blue-collar, but still middle-class neighborhoods. Take Orlando - there’s something like 50 or 60 stores in the area, but only two in the western suburbs, in Ocoee and Clermont, both middle class but blue-collar communities. El Paso just got Starbucks last year. Here in Cleveland, they’ve saturated the affluent inner eastern suburbs, but go north to Euclid and western Lake County, or south to Garfield Heights, Maple Heights and Bedford Heights, and they’re nonexistent. That’s not to mention African-American communities; I would bet Starbucks stores are much harder to find in south suburban Atlanta than north, or Prince George’s County than elsewhere in the DC area.
Considering the Starbucks “fad” didn’t start in the '00s, but rather in the early '90s, I’m pretty sure it’s here to stay. Americans have discovered they like fancy, frou-frou drinks and coffee with a higher quality than Folgers instant.
methinks you’re closer with your assessment if you stick with the “frou frou” comment.
we americans love us some bells and whistles and if something costs more, then, dammit, it’s gotta be better, right?
Here to stay. But without me, of course. They serve coffee. :eek:
Whatever your opinion on whether there are better coffees than Starbucks (and I agree that there are), surely you are not suggesting that Folgers Instant is one of them…
Coffee House are here to stay. Maybe not Starbucks in it’s present charge for internet form, but the type of market that it helped create anit goin away anytime soon.
$2 for a cup of coffee (large, regular, leave room) is high – for a cup of coffee. But for a cup of coffee and a place to sit and read for an hour, with access to a john and no one bothering you or expecting you to move on – not too exorbitant. I think that’s actually what their niche is – a public place to hang out without it being a problem.
And I was to some extent using “Starbucks” generically, Bosda – the phenomenon, in bookstores and elsewhere, of a place with sofas where you can get a fancy-ass cup of joe and a pastry of some sort and just hang out – it’s a phenomenon of the last ten years or so. (Yeah, Neurotik, the company was founded in the early '90s – but I don’t think they really reached critical mass as a mainstream institution until the last five years or so.)
Good point on the class/neighborhood differences, elmwood – my immediate neighborhood isn’t “good” enough for a Starbucks, though there’s an independent store nearby [which, BTW, isn’t open much past 8 on weekday evenings, which I think is a poor decision by the proprietors if they’re trying to make it a place to hang] – but there are two more fashionable neighborhoods nearby, each with its own Starbucks, and one with an branch of one of the local chains.
That may or may not be true, I can’t tell you about the national scene. But they were pretty ubiquitous as a hang-out spot when I was in high school in southern California in the mid-90s. I also remember a lot of jokes about Starbucks being everywhere around that time. Also, I remember Fight Club having a scene where they destroy a bunch of coffeehouses that were clearly supposed to be Starbucks so already they were already a juggernaut by 1999.
It could just be that since I was on the west coast, the saturations started sooner in my area than in yours.
You could be right. God knows I’m not exactly the litmus test for hip and happening. 
We have REAL Coffee shops here in Euclid 
They serve a pretty good cuppa tea, too.
To be fair, Philly only became hip and happening a couple of years ago so you get a pass. 
Starbucks was founded in 1971. The moriginal company’s name and assets were acquired by their director of marketing in 1987. They went public in 1992. They’ve definitely been around since before the early '90s.
Yes, Starbucks is often seen as universal by people who tend to live and associate in the same type of areas.
The various small/medium sized Virginia towns I’ve been through or lived in at various points in my life are unknown to the Starbucks hydra.
McDonald’s on the other hand, I’ve even seen them in upscale areas of some towns. For example I remember seeing a McDonald’s that was done in a pseudo “stylish” manner just so it wouldn’t violate the local zoning laws of a fairly upscale area of town. And they’re definitely all over middle and lower class areas.