Behind the success of Starbucks

The waiter at the first Starbucks store is smiling.

Starbucks, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA, has been developing for nearly 40 years. Without advertising, Starbucks has expanded into the largest coffee shop chain in the world, which has become a miracle in the industry. On a rainy weekend afternoon, the reporter visited the first Starbucks store at 1912 Park Market Street in Seattle.

Starbucks No.1, like the Pike Fish Market across the street, has long been one of Seattle's business cards. There are a lot of people outside the shop, and it's very crowded inside. The long line is just for a taste of coffee here. Two days later, at 9: 00 p.m., the reporter came here again. It's not all dark, and the shop is still open, but there is less noise, so we can take a closer look at the number one Starbucks store in the world.

The shop is rectangular and covers an area of about 60 square meters. There are no tables and chairs for customers to sit down for coffee, let alone the fashionable furnishings of other stores. There are two maps of the world on the wall near the counter, one of which has a card in the bottom frame indicating that as of October 4, 2009, Starbucks had 16082 stores around the world.

Reporters who usually don't drink coffee also asked for a cup at this time, accompanied by wisps of fragrance, savoring the legendary start-up story of Starbucks from here. More than 40 years ago, a businessman named Alfred Pitt was doing brisk business in Seattle selling coffee beans and related equipment. Inspired by this, Baldwin, an English teacher who knew Peter, Siegel, a history teacher, and Buck, a writer, teamed up to open the first coffee bean store in Seattle on March 30, 1971. At first, the store was located at 2000 West Street, and then moved to its current location. After several discussions, the name of the shop was inspired by several partners from American novelist Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick, and they finally agreed to name the name of Star, the coffee-loving first mate on the whaling ship Piguard in the novel.

Howard Schultz joined Starbucks in 1982 as director of retail and marketing and was the first to suggest that Starbucks should sell not only coffee beans but also steam-pressurized drip-filtered coffee. Several entrepreneurial partners initially rejected the idea. For them, coffee should be brewed in their own homes, and entering the beverage market goes against the original intention of starting a business. Schultz, who stuck to his ideas, opened a new coffee shop in April 1986 and bought Starbucks the following year. Since then, Starbucks has increased its business content and expanded rapidly, leaving Seattle to open a branch in Vancouver, Canada. In 1996, Starbucks opened its first store outside North America in Tokyo, Japan. So far, Starbucks has more than 17000 stores in about 50 countries and regions around the world.

In the first Starbucks store, the waiter talked enthusiastically with the reporter. Starbucks' corporate culture is to encourage waiters to communicate with customers. In fact, one of the secrets of Starbucks' success is to make it a "third communication space" different from home and office through a series of changes and innovations. According to Schultz, what Starbucks sells is actually an "experience". In this experience of coffee culture, coffee itself is not even important.

During the conversation, the reporter learned that Starbucks had also encountered accusations of "unfair competition", labor disputes, environmental damage and even explosions in the course of its development. Starbucks has been forced to close nearly a thousand stores in China since 2008 against the backdrop of the financial crisis. Under intense pressure from competitors, Starbucks also began offering free wireless Internet access in stores in the United States and Canada in July this year. Starbucks executives want to run alcohol in the store, but there is a heated debate about the company's cultural value-in fact, big is still a big problem.

China Coffee Trading Network: www.gafei.com