Starbucks was the gateway drug to specialty coffee. Customers tried it there first and then graduated to the often-superior products sold by indie shops. Even Duane Sorensen, owner of the proudly anti-corporate Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, concedes that Starbucks raised standards in the industry. Ward Barbee, publisher of the coffee publication Fresh Cup, is even more effusive. “Every morning, I bow down to the great green god for making all of this possible,” he told the Willamette Weekly in 2004. In short, Starbucks and indie shops grew up side by side. Indie shops learned from Starbucks’s retailing genius and built off its customer base. Then the indie shops left Starbucks in the dust.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Think Starbucks drove little independent coffee shops out of business? Just the opposite:
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2 comments:
I was talking with a local entrepreneur about his business once. We were talking about how wide open the market for some certain product was. He gave me one of the most important pieces of advice in business which is:
A wide open market often takes years and years and many many dollars to develop. Sometimes it's wide open for a reason... no one wants the thing. So often it's far more profitable to follow in the footsteps of another company, to present yourself as a competitor and therefore to maximize your profit by not having to spend time developing the market.
I'm proud of you for posting this.
-Katie
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