Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Three Seattle Starbucks locations are getting a homey makeover, the Seattle Times reports:
The ubiquitous coffee-shop giant is dropping the household name from its 15th Avenue East store on Capitol Hill, a shop that was slated to close at one point last year but is being remodeled in Starbucks’ new rustic, eco-friendly style.
It will open next week, the first of at least three remodeled Seattle-area stores that will bear the names of their neighborhoods rather than the 16,000-store chain to which they belong.
The new stores will eschew anything that smacks of corporate branding—even their coffee bags will bear the name of the shop instead of the Starbucks logo. And the folksiness doesn’t stop there, folks: Amenities will include beer and wine, hand-pulled espresso shots, live music, and poetry readings.
In order to figure out what makes neighborhood cafés tick, Starbucks HQ sent observation teams out to do some authenticity recon. Stealth missions these were not: One local coffeehouse owner told the Seattle Times, “They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with these obnoxious folders that said, ‘Observation.'”
Creepiness of rebranded coffee bags and synthetic hominess aside, there’s actually something encouraging about this: Starbucks’ attempt to emulate the little guys suggests local coffee joints are weathering the recession better than I thought. I had assumed mom-and-pop cafés woudn’t be able to compete with the chains. Maybe I was wrong. Cool. But can the real little guys compete with the fake little guys? Man, oh man. Would that DFW were around to tackle that one.
HT J-Walk Blog.
