POUR IT FROM THE HEART - STARBUCKS COFFEE WORLDWIDE

Starbucks, the global fast-coffee-chain and preferred target of anti-globalisation-rioters (easy, there is a Starbucks everywhere), has finally opened up two shops in Vienna. There will be nine more until the end of the year and the plan is to have reached the number of 140 shops in Austria alone in 2005. Reason enough to take a closer look at the coffee-chain.

To start, I'd like to give you some interesting figures on the status of Starbucks today. Then you answer me, if this is really the epitome of globalisation-fears. There are now 5.150 shops worldwide. About 4.000 are located in the USA and in Canada, the rest is distributed heavily in Japan and the asia-pacific region, some in the middle east, and things are booming in Europe. There will be 4.000 more stores in Europe until 2005, which makes Starbucks the fastest growing gastro-chain in the world. Every day 4 to 5 new shops are being opened. 20 million customers are being served per week. The average customer visits Starbucks 18 times a month, while some 4 percent come at least 4 times a day. Starbucks roasts 60 million kilogramms of coffe per year (which is not even 1 percent of the whole market for coffee, but still a lot used in only one chain.) Starbucks has big cooperations with the Pepsi-Company, producing the beloved Frappucino in bottles, which is sold in supermarkets and gas stations all over North America. There are also cooperations with the ice-cream-prodcuer Dyer's and several others. The largest Starbucks-store is located in Seoul and goes over four floors of a building. The smallest stores are only 16 squaremeters. Not bad for a company that started with a single store selling coffee beans in 1978.

Also the companies economic philosophy is quite impressing. They buy all their coffee-beans directly from the farmers and have their own roasting houses. There are no stations inbetween. They have worked out the complete horizontal chain of production in their own hands. They have never made classical advertisement, such as billboards, tv- or radio-spots, and are among the top 100 brands worldwide. They have no debts with banks to account for and pay everything from their own cashflow. Workes in Starbuck-shops are called partners and they have to undergo a 4-week training to ensure their dedication to the job, to quality and customer service. The philosophy of Starbucks includes that the worker (or partner) takes care of the business and the business takes care of the partner. For instance, all partners get health insurance, holidays and a pension fund, which is not a regular thing in the USA. This way Starbucks made it amongst the top 100 preferred employees in 2001 (source: Forbes magazine).

Now, is Starbucks an evil machination of global capitalists? It certainly looks that way. But, as usually, our world has grown quite complex and some times hard to understand in the ways it works. Since Starbucks doesn't do classical advertisement, they do other things. Next to the expectable tactics, such as press-relations, sponsoring and product-placement (the financed the new movie "I am Sam" with Michelle Pfeiffer so heavily, that ca. one third of the whole movie plays inside a Starbucks-store), they put a great importance on local, social issues. Every store-owner has to dedicate about 6 % of his yearly budget to sponsor such projects as playgrounds for disabled children, benefits for talented poor children, kindergartens, AIDS-projects, ecological projects and so on. This way, the local residents experience Starbucks as a responsible operation within the community.

There is more. Starbucks only buys high-quality-coffee, farmed higher than 1.000 meters from sealevel. Usually these are the places where the harvest of the bean-farmer is smaller, therefore these are the places where the poorest farmes live in miserable conditions. This is where Starbucks steps in. To ensure long-term-relationships with the producers of high-quality coffeebeans, they build schools and hospitals, teach the farmers to grow coffee-beans at a higher level of sophistication and machination, bring them new equipment and work out long-term-contracts with them. And they pay them about 30 % more than is the average market-price. (On the world market of coffee and related goods, quality is of no interest. Global food traders pay per ton.) You know that Trans-Fair-coffee, that comes from Fair Trade agreements with famers in the poor regions of third world countries? Starbucks buys that coffee. More than that, they proactively work to develop poor countries in a sustainable manner.

It has become a fact, companies have to step in and to the social work that used to be done by social foundations. Of course, their interest is not mainly for the good of humanity. They want to make money and ensure their profits. But the way to these profits leads through the development of and fair trade with poor countries. Starbucks is a partner in the central management of CARE. They exchange development-aid with a steady influx of high quality products. This is an interesting fact and one well worth to consider, because if a worldwide company supports local social projects in this manner, this is clearly a good thing. Do people in an AIDS-clinic care if Starbucks paid for the clinic or not. I don't think so. Surely, the mixing of social issues and economic interest might seem to get people into situations of moral hazard, but if you think about it, this is the only way to do these things nowadays on a larger scale. That social projects depend on the generousness of civilians during easter and christmas is not a steady enough foundation to work such a project. Companies spend bigger amounts of money and as a partner, are more reliable than the tv-audience sending in their small change.

Moreover, as always, these economic successes wouldn't be possible, if the customers wouldn't support them. Me, I still prefer traditional Viennese coffee-houses, even if the waiter is unfriendly and the snacks aren't fresh from the shop. There is a certain atmosphere of a hundred years of people spending hours in a place, that can't be sold in pre-packaged "fifteen minutes in the third place" (your home being place one and your workplace being two). On the other hand, I like the veggie-sandwiches from Subway, so there you go. Purely evil, I don't think so. The best thing to ever have happened since Jesus invented sliced bread. Nope, either. The answer is always somewhere inbetween. Learn the facts to make up your own picture.

So, is this the real picture. Most of the information above comes from a presentation by the Austrian headmanager of Starbucks. Of course, I checked the internet, trying to find all that evil scoop that is so easy to shovel up e.g. with Nike or McDonald's. But except from a few emotional and very personal hate sites and some modern customer complaining about "this employee didn't smile and look me in the eye when I changed my order for the fifth time in a row" or "my glass was dirty so I am going to sue them for 10 million bucks", I couldn't find much really evil stuff. Sure, the packaging company in contract with Starbucks works together with prisons, i.e. the inmates produce the packages. But they get paid minimum wage (about $ 6.20) instead of the usual prison-labor wages (ca. $ 0.70 to $ 1.10). And all the grass-roots, economic world-watch-organisations only complain that what Starbucks is doing is not to the last detail what they promised, but still really good in comparison to other companies. Can you believe it? The world is sure strange, when you can't fight evil because getting rid of the evil would destroy the good as well. (If you are thinking ying-yang now, you can kiss my pootang...)

Maybe we should stop this rambling with the unforgettable thoughts of the Miss USA 1994 to ponder over: "I wouldn't want to live forever, because we can't live forever, because if we could live forever, we would live forever, which we can't, so I don't want to live forever." To some, the world is an even stranger place.

www.starbucks.com official site

www.starbucked.com angry customer

www.ihatestarbuck.com he hates starbuck

there is also a guy who wants to travel to each and every starbucks-store there is and takes a foto of them. He has a quite large collection of them online, but I can't remember his URL now.