Posted
Feb 01 2008, 02:08 PM
by
Robert Walberg
This weekend when you get up early, grab the newspaper and head over to Starbucks for some coffee and a breakfast sandwich, you better savor the flavor of the eggs and bacon, as management announced that it will be pulling its egg sandwiches from the menu. Apparently, management is under the impression that consumers aren't frequenting its stores as often as in the past because the odor from the eggs overpowers the aroma from the coffee, thereby destroying the whole Starbucks sensation.
Something stinks, but it's not the breakfast menu. Okay, so there is a faint smell of bacon and eggs from time to time, but so what. Are we really to believe that the average Starbucks consumers' sense of smell is so refined and/or delicate that they can't stand the odor wafting from the kitchen area while waiting a few minutes for their coffee? Seems to me people have been doing it for years at McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, and the local diner. The two -- coffee and breakfast -- aren't incompatible. In fact, they seem to go together rather nicely.
Frankly, what I smell is a lot worse than eggs and bacon -- it's a management team trying to pull a fast one on investors. Traffic at Starbucks is down from the pace it enjoyed a couple of years ago, but that has less to do with the customer experience being scrambled by breakfast items and much more to do with ever higher coffee costs, a sluggish economy and increased competition. That's the three-headed monster depressing growth and until management starts to honestly address these problems, the stench coming out of Starbucks will be its quarterly financials.
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