More Stupid Than the Others

In my own time, I read this blog called ‘Starbucks Gossip’ which features a lot of news on the subject of Starbucks in the United States – from facts like “Britney Spears is ruining the image of Starbucks whenever she goes into a store” to the introduction of plastic caps to prevent coffee from spilling and such. I think I read it because coffee is still of interest to me and Starbucks has always been an interesting case to study, in many ways.

Recently this whole “shopping experience” thing came to my attention because everyone seems to be boasting it but rarely do you get a wonderful overall experience when purchasing something. I’ve seen and read a lot of things on the importance of advertising as ‘entertainment’ and that it should be the first and foremost thing an ad does to you. Psychologically speaking I’m not sure if we remember funny things better than anything else but I do know that we remember things that stand out from our daily lives and routines. Anything out of the ordinary. And to say entertaining ads are more likely to be remembered would mean we all live very boring lives (overall) and don’t do a lot of things that excite us. All I remember from school is the day we broke one of the sinks in the toilet – outrageous and funny at the time. Most of the time, the “funny” things are remembered as “the good things” and everything else the “meh” or not-so-worthy of being mentioned.

Then come the bad things. We’ll remember bad experiences because it’s in our nature to learn from them so that we don’t repeat them (in theory). It’s quite a simple mechanism but depending on the degree of pain and/or discomfort the experience causes, it will stay with us for a longer while, being evened out in about six months’ time supposedly.

Anyway, this is where Starbucks comes in – and maybe not just Starbucks but other places too, this one being the only one I could observe. If you visit the U.S. Starbucks website you’ll notice a message following you around asking if you have a great idea to share with the company. Naturally there are two ways of looking at this:

• Starbucks will make me famous for having a coffee recipe in their menus, they’ll brand it and it will be amazing
• Starbucks has run out of creative ideas for their coffees and can’t innovate in their attempt to please consumers.

Sometimes in my own scepticism I’ll go with the second version. They’ve recently changed their logo (but it doesn’t resonate with people), added more “convenience” so you receive a plastic mermaid-shaped cap to prevent your coffee from spilling on the inside of your car because some stores should have just been drive-in stores and not actual coffee shops at the cost of plastic waste and some dissatisfaction from die-hard recyclers and eco-friendly consumers. Overall the brand isn’t doing so well and having slummy celebrities advertise your coffee is bringing it down even more. Even the ‘brand tags‘ experiment has let people label it as “expensive”, “burnt”, “corporate”, “everywhere” and “evil”.

What I will never understand about Starbucks and other similar places is this: if Schulz intended it to be a coffee shop where you could sit down, relax, have a cup of coffee, work on your laptop over wireless, do whatever you want as long as you spend time there, then why are there no toilets in there? Coffee has a highly diuretic effect on most people and it takes less than twenty minutes to feel a sudden urge after having drank a cup. The same goes for beer. I’ve been to at least twenty coffee shops and none of them have a loo. It’s most disturbing.

Running around looking for one is not what I’d like to find myself doing – not sure if it’s company policy or the twenty or more Starbucks coffee shops are an accident but some thinking behind it (e.g. placing it in near proximity of a loo) would have helped. It went horribly wrong just one time when in a shopping centre I had to run to the nearest toilet to discover that I needed 50p (which I didn’t have). Same with many other places. Search for a coin, curse the coffee you just had, remember that you couldn’t do your thing and stay very far away from the place next time.