Chicago, Seattle first markets to get instant Starbucks — chicagotribune.com
I consider myself a Seattleite. I discovered the joy of drinking coffee in the home of Starbucks, Tully’s, Seattle’s Best, and countless local coffee shops that inhabit every corner of the rainy city.
To me, the experience of drinking a latte, machiato, cappuccino, or simply a “coffee of the week” encapsulates the smells, soft decor and friendly greetings from the barista at my favorite coffee shop. Living overseas, I have turned to Starbucks over and over for a taste of Seattle and a feeling of home.
There is no denying that the Starbucks experience is one that does not come cheap. Here in Switzerland, a grande latte, my drink of choice, sets the consumer back nearly $7. In an economic downturn such as that the US and the rest of the world are experiencing right now, such expenses are often the first to be reduced by cash strapped consumers. In fact, I recently began bringing a thermos of homemade coffee to work every day, rather than stopping at the Starbucks at the train station as I had done for several months not long ago.
Starbucks, which recently announced the closure of hundreds of its locations around the world, is actually expanding its product line while simultaneously closing down shops. It may not be in the way you expect, though. Soon, I’ll be able to get my $7 cup of coffee for as little as $1, it will just come in a different form:
Starbucks Corp. will launch its new instant coffee product next month in Chicago and its home turf of Seattle, with a full-scale, national offensive set for the fall.
Starbucks on Tuesday formally unveiled the new product, called Via Ready Brew. It will be available in Starbucks retail outlets in the Chicago and Seattle areas on March 3, Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview with the Tribune.
Instant coffee from the king of gourmet blends? Sounds suspicious. Well, it’s all about economics, you see. Starbucks coffee is a normal good, one for which demand falls as incomes fall, as evidenced by falling sales at its coffee shops around the world. In order to maintain its customer base even as incomes fall, a company like Starbucks must expand its product line to include inferior products, or those for which demand increases even as incomes fall. Clearly, instant coffee is viewed as an inferior product, due to its significantly lower price and reputation of poor quality.
Furthermore, Starbucks’ new product is in response to increased competition from lower-end fast food chains that traditionally did not compete in the coffee market, but recently have begun offering various blends and varieties of coffee to the price-sensitive coffee consumers, further harming business at Starbucks’ higher end coffee outlets.
Via marks Starbucks second announcement this month of a cheaper menu alternative, as the famous coffee chain struggles in a weak economy. Starbucks is also now selling pairings of coffee and breakfast offerings for $3.95.
Starbucks’ troubles have occurred at the same time value-oriented fast-food chains, particularly Oak Brook-based McDonald’s Corp., have thrived. McDonald’s owes part of its success to improving the quality of its basic coffee, and expanding into new drinks like iced coffee, and, more recently, flavored specialty coffees such as lattes and cappuccinos.
Still, Schultz said McDonald’s coffee offensive hasn’t really affected Starbucks: “We have a lot of respect for McDonald’s as a company. But we have not seen any significant issues with McDonald’s share of the coffee business affecting Starbucks.”
McDonald’s offers “a different product, a different value proposition,” he said. In fact, Schultz said McDonald’s should expand the overall coffee market, thus leading some customers to “trade up” to Starbucks.
Despite the CEO’s claims that Starbucks and McDonald’s coffees are “different” products, it is clear by his firm’s decision to expand into the instant coffee market that Starbucks is concerned about the loss of customers to lower-end coffee retailers.
The theory of firm behavior as studied in AP and IB Economics teaches us that firms in oligopolistic or monopolistically competitive markets, such as that for coffee shops in the US, tend to compete using non-price methods such as product differentiation and advertising. Rather than slashing the prices of all of its coffee in the face of a recession and falling consumer incomes, Starbucks has instead diversified its product line to include lower end options for consumers whose sensitivity to price and demand for gourmet coffee have been adversely affected by the weak economy.
