There has been a lot of online talk lately concerning Starbucks having lost it's soul. The offender? The Two-Buck repeat drink. Granted, once you start competing for the lowest price your soul has been sold long ago. But what really did it for me was when I found out that all Starbucks were using automated machines to pull espresso shots instead of the La Marzocco they used before. They took a craft and automated it to the point where a monkey can pull as good a shot as a twenty year veteran barista.
The goal of all this is to streamline your product and make it impossible to differentiate from the same product at another location. McDonald's does this perfectly; a Big Mac will taste the same at every hour of the day at any McDonald's on the planet. But is this a good thing for Starbucks?
The main idea behind roasting their coffee beans to the point of burning them and automating the espresso shots is to provide consistency to the customer. The burnt beans will taste the same year after year even when different meteorological and environmental factors have influence the taste profile of the bean. The automated espresso shots will then yield a constant, boring product that will never be great, but also never horrible. However, the price you pay as a customer is that you will never get a remarkable drink at Starbucks without having the barista (who is just a technician, not a craftsman) pour insane amounts of sugary syrups in your drink.
On the other hand, a barista that uses standard semi-manual espresso machines, tamps his own coffee and is allowed to play with brewing temperatures and coffee grinds adjustments will be able to provide you with the most succulent and mind blowing espresso drink that the quality of his beans will allow him to make. The downside? He might miss his shot and give you something that is either tasteless, bitter or even worse, sour. The trained barista, though, will give you more amazing shots as they get more experienced and eventually never pour a bad shot... ever. Plus, any respectable coffee shop will throw away a bad shot and pull a new one. After all, it'll only cost the company 1/30th of a pound of coffee beans to do that.
This is were, in my opinion, Starbucks lost it's soul. They don't like to pour extra shots. When you have that many locations, all those extra shots add up. On top of that, they have to pay their skilled barista a lot more to prevent them from leaving. Buy purchasing automated machines (at the cost of thousands of dollars per machine) for all their location, they indicated that it was cheaper for them to do so than to provide us with great coffee all the time. Gone were the days were coffee tasted good at Starbucks.
Wine and fine cuisine
Could you imagine winemakers doing the same thing? They could let their grapes over-mature every year in the hopes that every bottle, every year, will taste the same. No more saying that 2001 or 2002 was such a great year. Now, there is no difference. Or they could invent a machine that takes those over ripped grapes as an input and spits out bottled wine at the other end. Think of all the money they'd save! No more lost batches, no over fermentation, the same alcohol content, the same flavors in every bottle! The year was humid, dry, hot or cold? No worries, the wine will taste the same.
No more wine experts. No more wine encyclopedias. No more wine collectors. No more satisfaction in drinking what you know is a good bottle of wine.
What about fine cuisine? Well, you get something like Olive Garden, a so-called Italian restaurant that serves food that is created and concocted in a central location and shipped to the restaurants, who mainly reheat it and serve it to you. The bread sticks will taste the same from location to location, the Alfredo sauce will not make you go crazy with delight; it'll simply be O.K., just average. No chef is going to prepare something amazing. Your food will never be awesome. It'll just never be bad. The only thing is that you might get that freezer taste in your chicken every now and then. Where did you think they get their chicken breasts from? The grocery store? Local producers? It's all about making it easy for the cooks to prepare your food. Same size and same weight chicken breasts take the same amount of time to cook. There is no need anymore for a chef that knows instinctively how to adapt to different situations. A college student at minimum salary can do a good job at cooking that chicken.
No creativity allowed
Just like Starbucks and Olive Garden love consistency at the price of greatness, other companies do the same at that price of stiffling creativity. Not all hope is lost though, I thought a couple years ago, when I read about a baking franchise that allowed their franchisee to experiment and create new products on their own! They only required that the new location follow the rules for the first year of operations. After that, it could do whatever it pleased. That resulted in a huge number of bakeries refining processes, business systems and creating new products. The parent company would then pay, once a year, to have franchisees come over and share their knowledge with one another in an effort to spread what works and make everybody better! Basic evolution principles! Instead of having a centralized office where upper management decides what you want to eat or drink based on focus groups and wide-area surveys, the ideas come from the ground; from the customer; from you! That resulted in a bakery that has adapted to the local culture and provides what people want in that region, not an average product that is designed to please the biggest number of Americans.
The soul is key
In my mind, the soul is the key to the quality of a product. Without the sweat and expertise that goes into the creation of a product, that product will never be great. Tomatoes sold by local farmers always taste better and fresh made pasta tastes amazing when the dough was made fresh the same day. There is just no going around it. The sould of these items is what makes our days better, and in the long run, we live a happier and healthier life because of it.
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