Starbucks Moves Ever Closer To Offering You Fries With That

Starbucks: This cup of coffee does not cost any four dollars, and the company that makes it would like you to remember that. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

All things are revealed in time; the new economy just has a way of hastening the process.

Last year, as the markets went into a free-fall, Starbucks cut jobs and closed stores. Now, with the financial picture darkening by the week, and with consumers looking at cheaper alternatives from McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and others, the Seattle-based coffee colossus has called for new measures.

Slashing prices? Cutting store hours?

Nope. None of that.

The company that bid you to see it as somehow different, as a kind of anti-McDonald's -- eco-friendly do-gooders sharing a cup of joe with the community and encouraging you to follow your bliss -- is now going the route of the big, bad burger chain.

How Starbucks is emulating the golden arches, after the jump...

Starbucks, you see, is worried that you regard it as a purveyor of four-buck coffee.

But instead of promising to make a cup of its coffee, you know, more affordable (or more mellow; does anybody actually like this overroasted, sometimes burnt-tasting brew?), the java giant has chosen to mount a major spin offensive.

According to a Wall Street Journal piece earlier this week, Starbucks' crack research department uncovered "what executives describe as a disconnect between the company's actual prices and consumer's perception of those prices." The company is angry, in the words of an executive V.P. of marketing, "that others ... have been propagating the myth of the $4 latte, and that is not true. We have got to correct the misperceptions that are out there."

So this week, in the corrective spirit, the company rolled out a new promotion -- for $3.95, customers can get a bowl of oatmeal, breakfast sandwich or roll to go with their coffee or latte.

See? We're not a purveyor of four-buck coffee. You get a roll, too!

In the roaring '90s, when conspicuous consumption was chic and a four-buck coffee was touted by owner Howard Schultz as an affordable luxury, you never heard anyone at Starbucks talk about perceptions and correcting the record. And you certainly never heard anyone whine about "the myth."

The myth! It was this myth that made the company what it was, that lifted it above all comers and made it seem better and somehow ennobling. More than a drink -- a status symbol! An attitude toward life!

Ah, well. What goes around, comes around.

The dot-commers went boom, then bust. Many of the new media giants have shown themselves to be just as corporate and cutthroat as the mainstream outlets they purport to have improved upon. And now a new-age company, the very model of a new kind of business, is revealed to be hopelessly old-school and out of touch.

Maybe it's me, but somehow, I find that kind of comforting.

Not as comforting, perhaps, as a cup of good, properly-roasted coffee. But as we all know, and as Starbucks has proven, you can't have everything.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.