Starbucks Replaced Home

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Whose brilliant idea was it to have coffee shops in bookstores? We are supposed to buy books and read them at home. If we read them for free while having coffee, we won't buy them.

We are forced to return home now. Starbucks coffee shops we used as an excuse to run away from the wife, kids, in-laws, boyfriends and girlfriends, continue to close their doors permanently, in this town. I don’t know about the U.S. and other countries. If I had access to the company’s financial records, I would be able to come up with a credible diagnosis: the what, why, when and how much.

Since I don’t, I will maintain that the coffee shop chain is having problems because it lost direction. It became a patio, a lounge, a dining table, a study, a den and an office, not a place that sells coffee to take away, or sit down for a few minutes, drink and go. I’ve always wondered about profit. How does Starbucks make profit from someone occupying a table of four, buys one latte and stays there for two hours? Maybe it was from the a.m. rush hours and coffee-to-go. Have you seen any film made in the last ten years, that did not start with actors clutching cups of coffee?

Talking about films, You Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan is about the morning ritual of picking up coffee from Starbucks and other coffee shops. Starbucks should have made money hand over fist because it has become the generic name for coffee shops. It is like i-Pad, Kleenex, Coke and Vaseline. It is synonymous with coffee. Starbucks is in films, T.V. dramas and novels.

If Starbucks is winding down in other places like this town, I think it would be, because it was side-tracked. It allowed itself to be the excuse to avoid home. Home sells products. That’s all it does. Homes are stacked with all ‘the comforts of home’ but we don’t like spending time there at all. It used to be daddy is working late or working weekends. Starbucks became the proxy for home, home-away-from home. And we forgot to buy the coffee. That is why Starbucks is history in this town.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Blogger Without Borders

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