White chocolate mochas are a vice of mine.  I don’t even like coffee but all too often, you’ll find me in line at Starbucks giving in to temptation.  When a company has become as prevalent as Starbucks, it’s hard to imagine what it was like before it arrived.  It’s excessive proliferation is the punchline of numerous jokes.  However, if you read any business news sites, you’re bound to come across regular articles talking about the decline of Starbucks.  ”It spread too fast, too far”, “overpriced coffee is not suited for the down economy”, etc.  Declining profits and stiff competition are frequently cited as the reasons for their fall from grace.  And while I think growing threat of Green Mountain Coffee and McDonalds expanding their coffee products are a 1-2 punch that anyone would struggle to compete against, it seems to me the real problem with Starbucks is Starbucks itself.

I remember reading a whole article in Forbes or some other similar magazine about the changes Starbucks was going to implement to expand their core business of selling just coffee.  They had several distinct strategies for continuing their amazing growth trend – 1) Grow their music and entertainment relationship; 2) Serve food, such as breakfast sandwiches; 3) Adopt new cappuccino machines that make a “perfect” cup of coffee, every time; 4) get turnaround time for customers at 3 minutes.

I can only speak anecdotally of course, but there is little doubt in my mind that Starbucks has gone downhill and I think it’s due to a failure of each of their business strategies.   The first, the entertainment business, is being scaled back as it isn’t having as much success as they were hoping.  The second and the third are directly related to the fourth — the amount of time to get a coffee from Starbucks has skyrocketed.  The new machines are slower and the staff is now too busy warming up prepackaged sandwiches to run the machines anyway.  My visits now range from 10 minutes all the way up to a half-hour… which is insane for a convenience.  Or rather, what once was a convenience and is now just a bad habit to kick.  And that, for me, is why Starbucks has a steep hill to climb if they want to maintain their brand as it is today.