Archives by Subject: starbucks
Why Can't Starbucks Have Normal Drink Sizes?
For some reason, the Starbucks I visited yesterday (to purchase a delicious Green Tea Lemonade!) was packed with lots of tourists. As I was waiting for my drink, I watched a grandmother and granddaughter trying to remember what they ordered. Was it Tall? Venti? Mocha? Frappuccino? They had no idea, and were awfully confused.
Starbucks gets a lot of attention for wanting to be the "third place" - home and work are the first two "places" - for its customers. It has happy employees (a 82% job satisfaction rate, compared to the usual 50%!)...
But why can't they just call tall, venti, and grade small, medium, and large?
EDIT:
As this guy says:
Tall, grande, venti? "All it means," says Mark Pendergrast, author of "Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World," "is small, too much, or way too much. I refuse to speak Italian to order a size." He's not surprised, though, that so many of us do respond (25 million each week, generating $268 million in profits in 2003). "If you feel a bit humbled," he says, "when you approach the great Wizard of Oz Coffee Maker -- 'I'm so scared, can I get through this ordering process correctly?' -- that can be appealing. It's very clever marketing." [emphasis mine]
Perhaps it's clever marketing, perhaps it's the cult of the brand, but it still seems obnoxious to me.
Posted in on August 04, 2005, 09:33 AM | Comments (7) | Permalink
Starbucks at New York Sports Clubs?
I was leaving the New York Sports Club I joined a few days ago yesterday and noticed they were having some kind of promotion. Set up in the lobby was a table full of free Starbucks coffee and food.
While I'm always a fan of free food, I had trouble understanding why they were packing the lobby of a health club with fat and calorie filled "food" from Starbucks. I noticed coffee cake (570 calories, 28g of fat per serving) and what seems to be "White Chocolate Macadamia Nut" cookies (470 calories, 27g of fat per serving).
I think Starbucks was sponsoring the day, but shouldn't whoever arranged this cross-promotion actually thought this through? On another note, they promised me there would be healthier food that evening.
Posted in on June 22, 2005, 10:29 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink
