Tunnel Vision:

It seems kind of totally blind-sided that the managers of Starbucks would miss the point that a cup of Latte Grande with espresso costs the same as a gallon of gasoline.

And with the big play-off between gasoline and a cup of coffee, a product that is increasingly viewed as an unaffordable luxury in today’s tight money environment, guess who’s going to win.

Meanwhile, the great minds at Starbucks keep blaming themselves.

You hear that the big mistake was the coffee equipment stands too high, therefore, the consumer is deprived of the rush that comes from seeing his designer coffee being made with the appropriate flourish and respect, something that one would guess would make up for the fact that he can no longer fill his tank to go to work…...

Others say it’s because the beans are being ground elsewhere so you don’t get the compelling smell of the beans when you enter the establishment. They may have something there…..I do miss the smell of the roasted beans being ground in anticipation of their going to their just reward.

But there is something else.

And it’s not Dunking Doughnuts getting into the act (their coffee still sucks!; and it’s not McDonalds rising to the occasion—Starbucks people would never consider the absurd notion of mixing brands…. You are either a McDonalds user or a Starbucks user and never the brands shall meet! That something else I am referring to is conjured up by Jackie Mason’s routine about Starbucks. Who the hell can imagine paying five bucks for a cup of coffee with a name you can’t pronounce and then having to squeeze onto an uncomfortable stool by the window?—especially when you can still find a cup of coffee for about a buck elsewhere….

But the simple truth remains, with coffee at the cost of a gallon of gasoline, which do you jettison first. And the truth should have been obvious at first glance.

It seems to me that Starbucks, like so many other American institutions—including that monolithic symbol of inflexibility and inscrutability that stands in Detroit, called GM, that thinks it speaks for the automotive industry, or did, and now faces bankruptcy, all suffer from “not getting it.”

GM staffers were famous, or perhaps infamous, for having everything told to them three times at meetings as deLorean explained in his famous book On a Clear Day, You Can See GM described in great detail how disconnected this giant really was.

America’s plight, today, is built on many things.

One of them is that we seem that too many of our most visible presences simply do not understand the environment as it exists today with a thriving China and India ready to pick up on the mistakes and bad judgment that our domestic enterprises seem to ignore or miscalculate in their rush to the banks on Friday evening.

We would all do better, it would seem, with a real infusion of reality.

In the end, may I remind you, it’s the people who decide; not those who inhabit the big boardrooms and shuffle money around but never get out there to talk to their customers.

And, therein lies their dilemma.

Perhaps their guiding mantra should be simply, “Get Real!”

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon