The Coffee Industrial Complex

Time for a rant. I was driving down 7th St. in Long Beach last night and noticed that two independent coffee shops are now Starbucks stores. The area is not my local neighborhood, so I don’t know when ownership changed. Congratulations to Starbucks on two more stores, and congratulations to the previous owners who I presumed got a good price to give up their leases. My sympathies to the locals because in my opinion Starbucks just ain’t that great! If you feel ready to rise up and defend Starbucks, I can understand it. My guess is that most Americans just don’t know any better coffee than Starbucks. Starbucks is the best in their experience simply because most Americans just haven’t had the experience of the superior espresso coffee that you can find in some other countries, or the excellent espresso made at a few independent coffee shops within the U.S.

Of my almost 50 years, I have lived the most-recent 10 of them in the United States, before that I had 4 years in Japan, and the rest in my country of birth, New Zealand. When I was growing up in New Zealand, there wasn’t the sophisticated “café” culture that exists there now. At home it was instant coffee; going out it was filtered coffee. The first coffee shops in New Zealand had been started by the many Dutch immigrants who moved to New Zealand after the Second World War. It was drip filter coffee; a long way to go yet. But the propensity of young New Zealanders to get off the rock and travel and work internationally, a phenomenon known affectionately as “OE” for “overseas experience”, introduced New Zealanders to European coffee standards which they brought back to New Zealand and so the café scene got going. Today thousands upon thousands of cafes in New Zealand serve superbly made espresso coffee drinks as a complement to food and wine not just in the urban centers, but right out to the cow towns as well, not least of them MacFarlane’s Caffe where I once worked. Many cafes have food menus offering light meals made on the premises, wine and beer lists, and waiters/waitresses to serve you.

The United States, meanwhile, has fallen victim to the industrialization and “corporatization” of food and beverage delivery. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who coined the phrase “Military-Industrial Complex” in a 1961 speech. I don’t know if there’s been a similar phrase coined yet for what has been happening in the food and beverage industry for many years now, but if there hasn’t, I’m about to do it. Call it any of the following: “Food Industrial Complex”, “Beverage Industrial Complex”, or “Coffee Industrial Complex”, but it’s all one and the same thing: large corporations have decided they can make the most money by taking out local independent providers, offering us branded food that is generic from coast to coast. To achieve the greatest economies of scale they need repeatable menus, repeatable training guides, and repeatable floor plans and layouts captured under the umbrella of a brand. Sure Americans must love it because you can see the success of it reflected in the profits of the industrial giants such as Starbucks, but it’s a Faustian bargain; we trade away our feelings of insecurity and the risk of a bad experience by going to a coffee shop or restaurant that’s branded, but in return end up with generic mediocrity.

Footnote: Here are a couple of links on the coffee wars in Japan. As I mentioned, I lived there for 4 years in the early 1990s. At the time I would have given anything for a Starbucks. The best coffee on offer at the time was the “Doutor” chain, whose stores were few and far between. Here’s an article on how Starbucks is being beaten off by Doutor in Japan. And this is a link to a paper written by a student at the prestigious Japanese Sophia University that studies the Starbucks vs Doutor marketing strategies.

I can teach you the one simple step you can take to move your espresso coffee drinks up from mediocre to great!