A Final Thought: Starbucks is the devil
By Mitch Allen
For 15 years now, Mimi Vanderhaven has been true to her mission of improving business diversity by shining the spotlight on quality, locally owned businesses, most of whom suffer from “the 500-foot rule.”
That is, local businesses often can’t afford the high rent district so they locate a bit farther away.
For example, wherever you find an Olive Garden, look for a side street. Go down that side street about 500 feet and you’ll discover a family-owned, local Italian restaurant that doesn’t have a lighted interstate sign tall enough to threaten low-flying aircraft.
They just have really good food.
National chains are evil not only because they snatch up the best real estate, but because they have a homogenizing effect on our towns and cities. They make us all look alike.
There is a big difference between New Orleans’ French Quarter and Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood only because of their unique local businesses. If both areas were filled only with the likes of Crate and Barrel and P. F. Chang’s, there would be little distinction. (There is no P. F. Chang, by the way. The restaurant is named for its two founders—Paul Fleming and Philip Chiang. Fleming also went on to launch Fleming’s Steakhouse).
Look, I get it. People love P. F. Chang’s, Chipotle and the Cheesecake Factory, and for heaven’s sake, don’t say anything against Target. You can bad mouth WalMart all you want, but Target is the sacred cow of the shrinking middle class. Everybody loves it.
Honestly, though, Target is just WalMart in lipstick. There are few differences other than Target paints its walls red, make its aisles five-percent wider and sets its prices five-percent higher. (Send hate mail to the email address below, but before you do know that I was among a delegation that traveled to Minneapolis in the mid-1990s to welcome Target to Northeast Ohio. Their marketing team had just one question for us: “What the heck is a Marc’s?”)
All this said, national chains employ thousands of people in our community and often provide diverse merchandise and low prices that no local business ever could. Plus, plenty of successful chains started here in Ohio, including Bob Evans, Wendy’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Arby’s, and we should all be proud of that.
By the way, Arby’s was founded in Youngstown by the Raffel Brothers (hence the name “R. B.”), but some folks still claim that the name is an acronym for “America’s Roast Beef Youngstown-style.”
Of course, national chains are brilliant marketers, a fact that allows them to become national in the first place. And part of being a brilliant marketer is understanding what business you’re really in.
McDonald’s, for example, isn’t in the hamburger business; it’s in the real estate business. It doesn’t matter how good their hamburgers are; it matters that there is always one near you when you’re hungry.
And Starbucks haters like to complain about how expensive the chain’s coffee is, but that’s only because the haters don’t understand what business Starbucks is really in.
They are, in fact, extremely cheap, the lowest priced competitor in their category. Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee. Starbucks sells a moment of personal indulgence that says, “I’m worth it,” and they do that for just five bucks. That’s a fabulous bargain compared to their true competition—massages, manicures, fine dining and a new purse.
Starbucks isn’t really the devil. It was named for Starbuck, the first mate in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and it has itself become a great whale. It’s so big and impersonal that it’s no longer a community gathering spot and its leadership knows this; it’s why they’re installing drive-through windows in so many locations. No one wants to go inside where no one talks and everyone stares at their cell phones waiting for their name to be called. Instead, we now want to stay in our cars and have someone hand us our moment of personal indulgence right through the window.
A coffee shop is for bringing people together, for building community, and once you install a drive-through window it ceases being a coffee shop and becomes, well, a McDonald’s.
And we don’t have to settle for that. Fabulous local alternatives are just 500 feet away.