industries

Starbucks Ennui

There’s a palpable sadness in the streets today. Starbucks is apparently retrenching from its relentless expansion in BC.

By Tony Wanless /

Starbucks BC

There’s a palpable sadness in the streets today. Starbucks is apparently retrenching from its relentless expansion in BC.

These cappuccino capitalists from Seattle turned Vancouver, which was pretty well wool and hiking boot culture, into the centre of Coffee Cool. A place where boulevardiers gathered to sip Ventes and stare at each other, like cool places such as Paris. Where people could have discussions about coffee that would put wine snobs to shame. A place where you could arrogantly (and usually at high speed) dismiss every other city in Canada as so backward.

Suddenly, a city where lingering for more than 10 minutes over a coffee was almost a criminal act became the centre of leisurely West Coast thinking, symbolized explicitly by the duelling Starbucks stores on Robson Street that, miraculously it seemed, both thrived.

As imitators piled into the market and the coffee culture spread, another phenomenon happened. The corner coffee shop became a business centre, where hundreds, if not thousands, of people conducted their daily work. I once tried to calculate how much economic activity was done in coffee shops, but gave up at the sheer enormity of the task.

But like all things that become popular, there was a limit. Pretty soon there seemed to be wall to wall coffee shops on every block. The population was divided into two types of people – the Starbucks crowd and the Tim Horton’s people (an analysis that was once used to account for a federal election result).

Starbucks became so common you noticed if there wasn’t one in the grocery store where you schlepped your weekly groceries. The saturation level Starbucks logo became wallpaper, almost boring in its ubiquity.

So the company is pulling the plug on some of its BC stores and deploying its expansion juggernaut in places like Poland, where they haven’t hit Starbucks ennui just yet.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for every twittering trendoid and bandwagon jumping business out there.

Like yesterday’s java, everything gets stale eventually.