Ask HN: Why doesn't Starbucks beat local coffee shops?

https://www.fastcompany.com/887990/starbucks-third-place-and...

"Starbucks goal is to become the Third Place in our daily lives. (i.e. Home, Work and Starbucks) “We want to provide all the comforts of your home and office. You can sit in a nice chair, talk on your phone, look out the window, surf the web… oh, and drink coffee too,” said Kelly. (Notice she put “drink coffee” last???)"

A friend of mine was high up in marketing at Starbucks in NY ~15-20 years ago, and her explanation to me back then was "What we supply to people is a comfortable and familiar place to sit and meet up with people. 'Coffee' is just the way we take money off people for that." This was an extremely valuable thing in NY specifically, where lots of even otherwise "wealthy" people lived in small and/or shared places - where inviting people into their homes socially or for small/contracting type business was way less attractive than meeting people at Starbucks, and a welcoming and familiar place to sit for an hour or two with your laptop or notepad is a really nice break from your tiny little NY apartment. "Better coffee" does not make that more valuable. Ubiquity and standardisation makes that more valuable. The coffee only needs to be "good enough" that people wont choose other, less familiar and potentially less welcoming feeling places to do an hour or two's work or meet up with people.

This also means in places where quality local coffeeshops start to become alternatives for “hangout spaces”, Starbucks may offer more intricate coffee options and reluctantly compete on that front. However, that’s rare.

Some of the true equivalents are chain coffeeshops of South Korea. They serve equivalently average-to-bad coffee.

Of note, during recent lockdown measures in Seoul, these franchised coffeeshops (including Starbucks) were singled out among all food and drink establishments as the only ones forbidden from letting customers sit in at all. I suspect it’s because they are effectively the “third place” for many people, so the government considered them a major vector.

Some branches more or less shut down as a result, since take-outs are just not worth it with that quality of coffee.

Perhaps even deeper. Starbucks knows it's customers do not care much about coffee quality.

Similar to Apple. Apple know it's customers don't care much about being able to pick and choose the graphics cards or ram modules in their computers, and they don't care much about removable batteries or microSD cards or headphone jacks on their phones. iPhones have "good enough" battery life/internal storage/headphone options, and Apple are totally happy to walk away from the small demographic of potential customers for who those things are showstoppers.

I am not a Starbucks customer. I know by first name the people who roasted the beans for pretty much all the coffee I've drunk in the last decade or more. I have 5-6 local roaster I buy from and I almost totally avoid cafes that aren't theirs (or who buy beans from one of them). My most regular "cafe" sells no food at all (Coffee Alchemy in Marrickville, for any Sydneysiders...) - only espresso based and pourover brewed coffee. (Until a few years back your only option was full cream cows milk or black.) When traveling I'll go and say Hi to people like Eileen at Ritual or Jeremy at Four Barrel (back before he turned out to be a creep). When I first visited Portland, I had a list of 5-6 places I wanted to visit based on recommendations and reviews, which grew to 12-15 places as I chatted with the baristas at the first few places. On the third day there I was at Coava for the first time, and when I ordered the girl behind the machine said "Oh, you're the crazy Australian with 'the list'!" The baristas there all drink together and talk about the customers :-) That was a super fun trip.

If _I_ were to start a food/beverage business, I'd be insane to target _me_, when the demographic of "people who are OK so long as the coffee isn't awful", and who might choose to spend money at my cafes for other reasons (like I've got one on 3 out of every 4 street corners in Manhattan, for example, or because I've got comfortable chairs and putlets to keep laptops charged) is so many orders of magnitude bigger.