Starbucks goes to Italy
Sure, our coffee is way better and Starbucks will fail, yeah yeah
The recent controversy on the palm trees in Piazza Duomo (an installation funded by Starbucks) and its arrival in Italy, precisely in Milan, reminded me of the talks that I heard when the first McDonald’s opened:
Pizza will defeat them
Do they really wanna teach us on how to make sandwiches?
Nobody will ever have dinner there
I just checked how many years have passed since the first McDonald’s opened in Bolzano: it was 1985, 32 years ago. At that time I was just 11 and I listened to these kind of talks each time a foreign brands tried to challenge Italy in our own game: pizza, coffee, clothes, no matter what.
I listened to an interview to Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, by the good Alec Baldwin: he said some things I already knew, namely, that he had the idea of opening a café the first time he went to Milan, observing that the bars were just like communities, an anthropological experience that we italians obviously take for granted but which is quite clear to a foreigner, especially a smart one like Schultz. For him, the bar is not only a place to have a coffee but it‘s a community. He also points out another interesting observation: the Starbucks customer feels as part of a community even if sitting alone and silent, because drinking a coffee there, watching who comes and who goes is different than having the same coffee at home.
Then he says another thing that confirmed my intuition. He had never yet attempted expansion into this beautiful country of hyper-protectionists people (when they feel threatened) and overly critical towards themselves in the other day for a simple reason: beyond the resistance provided to enter a market so cohesive and protective as that of Italian cafes, he always respected a country that gave him the inspiration in the first place. I saw it as a touching expression of his desire to prove that he can make it perfectly (are 22,000 shops enough? There are in fact so many Starbucks coffee shops in the world, all owned by Startbucks itself, except for those at airports where retail space is not on sale) in the very place where he had the inspiration. There are prevailing commercial logics behind it, I am not so naive not to know that, but I think that the human factor is not insignificant in this case.
This is not a defense of Starbucks. I went at their cafes few times and I cannot say I have a particular experience. Being Italian, I giggle when I read the names of their beverages. Then I look amazed how many calories they put into a cup (there are some frappuccinis that dwarf a T-bone steak) but the point is another one: Starbucks sells an experience, that is spending hours in a coffee shop, sitting on a comfortable chair, with free wifi, without anyone banging you out. I would say that their business model is making you feel at ease. Are we good at it here in Italy? I’ve been thinking about that often because I’m spending a lot of time in Venice lately: a singular case and perhaps repeatable only in few Italian tourist cities, but I often had the unpleasant feeling, looking for a place to eat, to find restaurants or bars where they treat you as a tourist to be squeezed. It is not pleasant and maybe I am just biased, but I do not think that the business model of places like these is acceptance: try for instance some bars in piazza San Marco where they charge you 15 Euros for a cup of coffee that you can enjoy along with 400 syphilitic pigeons. Ok, it’s Piazza San Marco, I know, but come on, there’s a limit.
How will Starbucks perform in Italy? Obviously very well, even if it is stupid and premature to make predictions. We will fall in love because we’ll like the experience and we’ll realize that these yankees do not want to colonize us. We’d better ask ourselves: would it be fine if it had been Illy to do such a thing, right? And, above all, would have they done it the same way?
I’m not saying that Americans are smarter (particularly lately): I’m saying that we should always try to have a different point of view, just like what Schultz did when he had that famous intuition in Milan decades ago: he saw things about us that we cannot see. He then exported that idea abroad and made it bigger. Is it a cultural invasion? It is a threat? Can we really call it an invasion, we, the same people that consider normal that Christmas is symbolized by a bearded fat man in a red suit? Are we serious? We love to be culturally colonized, especially when we are unaware of it. Because we are too focused on our coffee made with our mokas with our water and it must be that particular water otherwise is won’t be good. And while we’re drinking that coffee we feel threatened because an American wants to sell his coffee in his bar where we can stay as long as we want. Per Dio!
