Raging Kraut

Well, if you can't bomb Paris

Posted by Ray on 01/16/04 at 07:33 PM • Blogs • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

...just send your businesses in to take over.

Some telling comments from the fray:

From Starbuck's CEO:

"Our success in other countries does not provide us with an entitlement to be successful in France," Schultz said.

Quite a refreshing attitude. But in private I'm sure they're already planning their next steps after crushing the competition.

From the competition:

"Starbucks is not going to compete with the French cafe," he said. "The cafe isn't just somewhere to drink coffee, it's a place where people go for social contact. In a big place with hundreds of customers that's more difficult."

And I thought that the two Starbucks on opposite corners of Burrard and Robson St in downtown Vancouver was a really stupid idea too. Until I found out those locations were the highest grossing for the chain.

I think the French are about to undergo yet another American marketing assault.

Some are realists though:

But he cheerfully accepts that the coming of the global coffee behemoth could spell the most serious threat so far to his company's decade-long existence.

"It's a bit like going into a nuclear war with a knife," he said of the competition.

Raging Kraut

Two on opposing corners? That's nothing. Come to Bellevue, WA, right across the lake from Starbucks HQ. In downtown Bellevue, you can take the Starbucks Store Tour:

* Start at 108th and 8th St. at the Bellevue Transit Center - there's a Starbucks there.
* Walk directly across the street into the Starbucks inside the mixed-use skyscraper.
* Walk down the shortcut path next to the skyscraper down to 106th Ave. NE, and walk one block west. You're at Barnes and Noble...which has a Starbucks conjoined to its hip.
* Walk down one block to 104th Ave - there's an "upscale" Starbucks on the outside facade of Bellevue Square mall.
* On NE8th, right across from the mall, there's a Starbucks in Bellevue Plaza.

And yes, they all make piles of money.

I love global hegemony.

Posted by Kensho Godchaser (Jay Allen) on 01/19 at 05:00 PM

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