Peter’s Place

I was somewhat amused when I loaded up the Drudge Report late Tuesday night and found this headline in large text ABOVE the Drudge Report logo:

Seriously?  Is this level of urgency necessary?  Are people actually surprised to see Starbucks closing hundreds of stores?

First of all, it’s an overpriced coffeeshop.  Yes, I’ll admit, I occasionally enjoy an Iced Mocha Frappuccino (thanks to Kelly for introducing me to those), but the key word here is occasionally.  Partly because we don’t live in a city where there’s a Starbucks on every block, and partly because I can’t justify paying nearly $5.00 every single day (that’s $25/week or $100/month) for trendy coffee beverages.

But sure enough, read the article, and two of the things I mentioned above are precisely the reasons Starbucks says it’s closing all these stores.

1. When gas prices are out of control and pushing prices for other necessities up… people can’t afford to pay “five dollars for a cup of hot liquid,” as Brian Williams put it on last night’s NBC Nightly News.
2. When you build a Starbucks right across the street or up the block from another Starbucks, both locations suffer.  The company built too many stores too fast.

If they built all these extra stores just because they didn’t want to have long lines and make people wait — here’s an idea — build them bigger!  Every Starbucks I’ve been in, the serving area is smaller than a decent-sized walk-in closet.  If the restaurants were a little bigger, they could have more workers, serving more drinks faster.  Instead of building 2 stores, build one that’s equivalent to 1.5 small stores.

Also, perhaps Starbucks needs to come down to reality with their prices.  Instead of $5 for a large cup of coffee, let’s shoot for maybe $3.50.  And I never buy any of the baked goods, but I might consider a chocolate chip cookie if it wasn’t $4.00.  I mean $4.00 for one cookie?  I can buy an entire bag of Keebler Chips Deluxe and have change left over.  Hell, I can even buy a box of Girl Scout cookies for less than that!

Still, the main point is how funny it is that Drudge thinks this deserves a major headline.  Sure, it’s “a talker” but does it really stand up there with truly massive events like hurricanes, celebrity obits and war?

I’ll leave with a YouTube video from “Family Guy” which fits the situation perfectly.

I was going to embed a clip from the “Family Guy” scene where the two writers are writing on their laptops at Starbucks just for the sake of being seen at Starbucks.  But no thanks to 20th Century Fox, the video has been removed from YouTube and I can’t find it elsewhere.  Arrgh!