the setting of the starbux star

starbux is closing over 500 shops and laying off hundreds of workers. why? they have mismanaged their business model. yeah, blame it on the economy if you want, but starbux did this to themselves - it would have happened anyway, no matter what the economy is doing. why? back to the biz model. starbux began as a cultish thing in seattle. it was a local coffee shop that made really good coffee & printed a pic of a half nekkid girl on the cups. they did well, so they opened another shop. and, another. and, a few more. the coffee was still good, and the concept caught on - pay a premium for premium coffee. starbux was not something you could get everywhere. it was exclusive, rare.

seemed like everyone was catching on to the concept, so the ol' buxsters kept on making new shops. the more shops they made, the more sense it made to systematize things. baristas became robotic extensions of corporate. all the shops looked the same. what was once special & unique became rote & common. hail, there are starbux in target stores. when something is readily available, we are no longer willing to pay a premium for it. there is a fine line between meeting supply & causing over-saturation.

as more & more stores were built, more baristas had to be trained to correctly work the equipment. specifically, the espresso machines were complex & difficult to work correctly, so all the manual espresso makers were replaced with automatic ones. the coffee lover's nemesis - the automatic espresso machine.

what was rare became overly abundant. what was unique became systematized. what was tasty became mechanical. what was special became rote.