Tycoons watch the world ─ challenge their ancestors Starbucks Starbucks and Italian coffee shops

If it wasn't for Italy, maybe Starbucks wouldn't exist at all.

Howard Shultz, the boss of Starbucks, founded the global beverage empire because of a business trip to Milan, Italy in 1983.

■ Europe lacks Italy. At first, Starbucks was a coffee bean company and did not sell coffee. Shultz was the marketing director at that time.

After Starbucks became a multinational company, Schultz described in a book how he was inspired. When he was in Milan, he got up one morning, sipped a cup of Espressos in a coffee shop near the hotel, and walked in the afternoon to the famous Milan Cathedral square Piazza del Duomo. "literally, the whole square is full of coffee shops," he said, with opera music in the background and the aroma of coffee beans in the air. There was a debate on political issues and a whisper of laughter from schoolchildren, and retirees and mothers with young children chatted with the barista.

At this moment, Schultz is surrounded by coffee, as if by the apocalypse: most Americans enjoy coffee in restaurants and tables at dinner, while Italians integrate coffee into their lives. Schultz realized that coffee can be more than just a drink, it can also be a life experience, which is a good opportunity with a lot of room for development, but Starbucks is just positioning itself as a coffee seller and is about to miss this opportunity. "it was like an epiphany, so direct and real that my whole body trembled," Schultz said. Nearly 30 years later, Schultz has brought home a vision that not only goes deep into American culture, but also attracts millions of followers around the world.

Starting from the coffee shops originally opened in Seattle, Starbucks has more than 11000 stores in the United States, 925 in Japan, 730 in the UK and 314 in Mexico. Starbucks can be seen in Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, Arabia and other countries, and recently announced that it will open its first branch in India.

However, there is no sign of Starbucks in the Piazza del Duomo where Schultz got the apocalypse, nor anywhere else in Milan. in fact, there are no Starbucks stores in Italy.

When Starbucks saw global expansion as the key to its growth, it found Starbucks in almost all European stores and in almost every European city, but not in Italy, the country that inspired Starbucks.

But this is not Schultz's plan. BusinessWeek reported that when Starbucks' global store project began in 2002, Schultz said, "I eventually plan to open stores in Italy and France."

Two years later, Starbucks opened stores in Paris and Lyon, but still did not move to Milan or Rome. "We want to enter Italy," Schultz said in an interview. "We just don't take Italy as seriously as other markets, but at some point we will be in Italy."

Schultz does not admit that they are afraid of the Italian market, saying that they just think that other markets are larger and have higher growth potential, and still declare that they will enter the Italian market one day.

■ Starbucks? I have never heard of it, but to this day, Italy is still an unconquered mountain of Schultz.

From a purely commercial point of view, Italy may not mean much value, but Italy represents the height of coffee culture, a gold standard; because of this, entering the Italian market represents a reputational risk. Starbucks has been slow to act.

What is Starbucks afraid of entering the Italian market and competing locally? Schultz did not say which coffee shops he encountered in Italy in 1983, when he probably missed Caff è Miani because of his busy work.

CAFF è Miani occupies the connecting Piazza del Duomo Cathedral and Skala

Every afternoon, baristas bring bowls of olives and pickled vegetables to the table and chill them with ice.

Caff è Miani is owned by Orlando Chiari, 78, who knows all the major coffee companies in Italy, and he has all the phone numbers of their owners, but when asked by reporters if he had ever visited Starbucks from Seattle, he looked dazed. "Starbucks?" No, I've never heard of it. "Chiari replied.

The BusinessWeek reporter stayed for a while to understand that Chiari really didn't know about Starbucks and was not joking.

Like Starbucks, Caff è Miani and other Italian coffee shops pay first when they order, but that's all they have in common.

Most restaurants in the United States, including Starbucks, fill small espresso cups (espresso cup), but in Italy, the typical coffee shop only holds coffee about a finger wide.

Cappuccino coffee is strictly limited to breakfast. Ordering a cappuccino after a big meal is what tourists will do. "cappuccino is almost a meal." "Chiari.

Chiari said he and seven Italian dignitaries visited Denver in 1988 to attend the International Lions Club conference. He said they used to order only one cup of coffee and share it. "one cup of coffee in America is enough for eight of us to drink together," Chiari said.

■ coffee culture is very different. Coffee culture in the United States is carried out by distilled coffee pot, but not in Italy. Italian coffee culture is brewed by Italian coffee machine (espresso machine).

The Italian coffee machine was first patented in 1901. The early Italian coffee machine contained a vertical cylinder in which boiled water kept near the boiling point and was released through double valves. The pressure caused by steam pushes the water through the bottom and drips into the coffee cup. Later, the improved Italian coffee machine has added handles, pumps, heat conversion system, and so on, but the basic concept is still the same: a hot, fresh drink can be finished in half a minute, and it should be finished as soon as possible, because the flavor of the coffee will soon go off.

Forget about soft sofas and light music! Italian coffee is like a New Yorker smoking a cigarette. It's a short break in a busy day.

Chiari can sell about 1000 cups of coffee a day, mostly at three rush hours: breakfast on the way to work, 10 a.m. break, and after lunch, guests all huddle to the bar to order coffee and drink coffee, a habit that is also played out in 140000 other Italian coffee shops.

Not only is the habit of drinking coffee different from that of Americans, but also the taste of coffee is very different.

Influenced by the early Italian coffee machine, Italians prefer heavier coffee and super-concentrated coffee, especially southerners.

Starbucks likes to use expensive Arabica beans with a variety of flavors, but in Italy, they mix the more bitter Robasta beans because of cost and market demand.

Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, wrote in a report to employees after visiting Italy in 2008: "Italian coffee leaves a strong, acidic and even sour taste on the side of the tongue, which is unpleasant and annoying."

Over the years, we have been the respectful inheritors of Italian coffee culture, and we have established our own career map to carry forward the coffee culture we have seen and experienced.

I must humbly say that we have improved the coffee culture. "however, for many Italians, Arabica coffee beans do not represent higher grade, just a different kind of coffee beans, and not necessarily better.

Gianluca Brizi, a coffee trainer, said that if he opened a coffee shop in Naples that used Arabica beans only, it might be closed the next day.

Although northern Italy does prefer Arabica coffee beans, they also like lightly roasted coffee beans, which they think will give them a better flavor.

On a "corporate espionage trip" to Madrid in 2007, Brizi spent a week visiting 21 Starbucks stores and concluded that Starbucks had good business acumen and was adept at finding gold storefronts, simplifying its production process and cleverly displaying its products, "but what is lacking is the quality of the goods," Brizi concluded.

The experience of ■ McCoffee Starbucks has encountered the biggest challenge of its globalization in Italy.

Starbucks may be able to teach tea-based Chinese and Japanese to taste coffee, but in the face of Italy, the source of coffee culture, Schultz faces more difficult problems.

Can a company survive when its products are visible on the street? And its consumers are still quite obsessed with their own culture? Is it possible for an international brand to repackage the local culture and sell it to the locals who created it? The answer is: possible! There is a reason for this, and one of the factors is that there are so many Italian tourists that tourists will find that Starbucks will be one of the few places where they can read, use computers and drink coffee. What they didn't think of is that before Starbucks, the United States was no different from Italy.

What Schultz does is let the Italian coffee tradition cross the ocean to the United States and inject Seattle-style leisure. That's why, for many guests, what Starbucks really sells is not coffee, but a place to kill time, a home outside, but this place also happens to sell coffee.

Such a home away from home, an office away from the boss, a place where you can sit and chat and read all day, is rare in Italy, and it is indeed a quite open market.

Perhaps multinationals, also from the United States, can serve as a precedent. The prime location opposite caf è Miani is now occupied by McDonald's, and McDonald's has been selling so-called McCaf é s in the past four years.

When McDonald's first opened a branch in Italy in 1986, it triggered a global anti-fast food movement. The concept of "slow food" is dedicated to preserving the local food culture and diversity.

But today, McDonald's has 41 restaurants in Italy, of which 116 have Italian coffee bars, serving espresso, cappuccinos and various pastries and desserts.

McCaf é s has become the fastest-growing part of McDonald's Italian business, and according to a 2010 McDonald's survey, one in five McCaf é s guests has never visited McDonald's before.

Unlike traditional Italian coffee shops, where guests leave after a mouthful of coffee, McCaf é s hopes to make guests linger. Italians may be picky about McCaf é s' coffee, but they are highly receptive to McDonald's way of providing such a new, slow experience of coffee.

■ competitors get a head start Starbucks may face more similar imitators if it is slow to enter the Italian market.

Not far from coffee Giani and McCaf é s flagship search number, opened and closed a coffee shop called Arnold, Arnold Coffee.