coffee business strategies

An open letter to Howard Schultz

Dear Mr. Schultz,

If you are reading this message (which I highly doubt — but we can pretend), please let me be the first to tell you thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Sincerely,

Andrew Hetzel

In the company’s best business move in years, Starbucks has nixed their breakfast sandwiches in order to stop pretending to be McDonald’s and return back to their core expertise: coffee. Hallelujah!

You can read the full AP article, here.

So far today, Wall Street does not seem to understand the move, but give them a little time to see the results; they’ll see the difference in a few quarters. I’m buying in; you heard it here first.

I’m not sure that this seemed obvious to the industry at large, but it’s something that at least one person believed should happen for a while:

“I foresee that Starbucks will need to return to its roots to regain its competitive advantage,” Hetzel says. “The company has drifted away from its original ‘third place’ environment concept with drive-thru and store-in-store locations; their once skilled baristas have become pushbutton machine operators, and straight espresso was taken off the menu in favor of ‘pumpkin lattes’ … They should get back to focusing on coffee and the formula that made them successful in the first place.”

Hey, that’s me!

You can read the whole article online or in the October ‘07 QSR Magazine.

It has been a long time coming, but I guess that it takes a lot of effort to get those shareholders behind the move.

Keep it up!

Oh, and one more thing Mr. Schultz, I understand that memo move now. You are good. Reign in some of those p.r. / marketing people doing all of the sneaky stuff and consumer sentiment will swing back in your favor. We all want to love Starbucks again.