Friar RareBeast wrote:
Starbucks have now closed 3/4 of their stores in Australia as most cities in Australia already have numerous cafes selling quality coffee all over the place. So many people I talk to who visit the US have trouble finding decent coffee anywhere. Starbucks is so ubiquitous there that it forces most decent coffee places to struggle. Over here we already had lots of quality places so Starbucks just got no traction.
Actually, that's completely wrong. Starbucks was the company that actually triggered the artisinal coffee movement in the US, which triggered similar movements abroad. "Decent" coffee didn't exist in the US before Starbucks created a market for it.
And it didn't exist abroad either.
Until the 1960s, essentially all coffee served in the world was from high-yield, easy-to-care-for trees that grew at medium altitudes. By today's standards you cannot make "good" coffee out of this. The cheapest off-brand can of grounds you get from a supermarket is realistically of a higher quality today than the best cup was sixty years ago.
That's the environment that let Starbucks actually excel. The coffee was so ****** and so lacking in flavor that they roasted the living hell out of it and started getting the area hooked on their (burned) dark roast flavor, because it was so much richer than just brewing it at a light or medium roast. They quickly expanded.
What happened is that people started to actually began seeing coffee as a beverage that had potential, and the price of "better" beans started soaring (and selling in the first place). These beans were from a coffee tree that was notoriously hard to care for, with a pathetic yield and tempermental nature, which mean that it was nearly nonexistent on coffee farms around the world. Combine that with the bad yield, and it was already a luxury good. The demand ensured the market could not grow.
It was in this period that the first artisinal tree was "re-discovered." We had never lost it, of course. But coffee farms of the time weren't at the same altitudes they are today, because the trees at the time couldn't grow there. That was the altitude they planted this tree at, and it's why it yield and product sucked. But move it up to its appropriate altitude, and it flourishes - solid yields and great body.
But no one had ever bothered to try before, because there was literally no market for artisinal coffee. At all. It wasn't a thing that existed.
This all went down in the south american market. It took a while for those trees to be appropriately bred and sold to European farming territories. And even today, the best coffee in the world isn't really provided by the areas that the European market typically accesses, because they just aren't climatically up to the task like areas of South America are. The best coffee houses in Europe are getting their coffee from the places that were founded by support from the American market.
I also want to make a big note here - much of the coffee you find in Europe is still grown with the crappy beans that cover most of the orchards that support the EU demand. The absolute reality of this situation is that Europeans are no different from the Starbucks-crazed Americans. You've been trained over time to love a flavor that isn't actually as deep or complex as a good cup of coffee. For the US and the French, that's a dark roast. Italian roast is a darker roast using a slightly different bean (but still one of the old versions).
And this was literally all caused by the fact that Starbucks created a market for coffee, which created a demand allowing farmers to experiment with their products (because sacrificing land to try growing coffee trees on a whim isn't something you were going to do when a market doesn't exist at all).
So hate their coffee or love it, they're absolutely NOT the reason other coffee houses can't compete. They're the reason those coffee houses have the chance to compete in the first place.
The reality, however, is that the number of people willing to pay $5 for a cup of quality coffee (like me) is relatively low, here. Most people are happy to settle for the average.
The difference in quality between Starbucks' blonde roast and their dark roast is pretty big. But most people get the medium or dark roast, because that's what they think tastes good. The blonde roast is actually the much more flavorful roast/bean (as in, the best of the crop go to the blonde roast, and the flavor isn't burned out), but it's not what we're culturally trained to like.
And to be clear - I'm not saying you have to like Starbucks coffee. It's far from being the best on the market. But they didn't come in and force out the small businesses. They created a market and have continued to dominate a market they created. Small businesses manage to be successful on their superior product wherever people are willing to pay for it. And if you're in a decently urban area and delivering a fresh product (particularly when you roast it yourself and it's fresh), you generally get to be fairly successful.
But if you're going to open a cafe and serve Green Mountain Coffee, then it's no surprise you're struggling.
But other businesses in other countries were able to capitalize on the new artisinal beans long before Starbucks had a chance to expand into their markets, and essentially created their own artisan market using the new product. But that product only exists because Starbucks created a market for it in the Americas.
Source: a book I'm trying to remember the name of right now. It was EXTREMELY well-researched, and if you're at all interested in the cultural history of some major modern culinary commodities, well-worth a read. My sister will remember - I'll post it when she texts me back.
I imagine Aeth would really like it.
