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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by davriellelouna@lemm.ee to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

Good article from the New York Times.


Summary

Starbucks China is losing customers at a very rapid pace. Starbucks corporate executives are angry. Brian Niccol, the new $100 million CEO of Starbucks, sounded the alarm in October, calling the competition “extreme”. For the Chinese Lunar year, Starbucks released a pork flavor latte. It cost more than $9 and was widely seen as a disaster.

Billionaire Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s former CEO, insisted that Starbucks would not enter a price war in China. He claimed "as chinese customers become more knowledgeable about coffee, they will want to upgrade from lower-end or discounted products"

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[-] njm1314@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago

Cuz it's truly legitimately just bad coffee?

[-] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

And somehow mcdonald's is expected to be quality barbecue?

None of these chains are any good but we use (or used to use them) for convenience and consistency

Never excellence because we know all the excellent places get bought out and turned into corporate shit factories so we pick the least offensive shit factory that suits our lifestyles and just get on with the business of working in a world that is slowly burning down to feed the greed of a pathologically insatiable owner class

[-] lowered_lifted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 months ago

Starbucks positions itself internationally as an ultra premium brand. I remember visiting one in Thailand and being astounded that the prices were the same as the USA, just converted to bhat. This meant that a single drink could cost like half a day's wages for a poor Thai person. I imagine the situation in China used to be similar before wages and purchasing power caught up. Now that consumers in China know enough about coffee to tell that Starbucks is crap, they won't pay American prices for it any more, and it's got Starbucks sweating.

[-] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

And Fosters positioned itself as a premium import beer when the real reason they sold it here was no one in Australia would touch the stuff

Marketing is lying and we shouldn't let them get away with it by calling it positioning

[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago

They sell it as a premium product in the US? That is funny.

[-] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Hmm, it was less a 'premium' and more it was selling the rough, laid back, no bullshit lifestyle as presented by Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee

So it wasn't really marketed as a 'quality' beer as much as a personality accessory

Most of the world jokes about American beer being basically water and they aren't wrong, but man Fosters has even less body than coors light

[-] viking@infosec.pub 4 points 2 months ago

McDonald's coffee is much better than Starbucks. Still not great, but better.

[-] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

true but that is more of a happy accident than product excellence in the fast food market

[-] OrteilGenou@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I didn't know about the US but in Canada McDonald's uses the supplier that used to supply Tim Hortons back before their coffee was enshittified by the corporate grindhouse, which makes McDonald's coffee about the best option short of true coffee houses

[-] viking@infosec.pub 1 points 2 months ago

I'm not so sure about that, they studied Starbucks' quasi-monopoly for quite some time and then decided to beat them with better coffee.

So at least they had a plan, unlike KFC with their "me too" approach. That stuff is so bad I'll rather risk headaches on a 10h flight than to refuel with that garbage.

this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
229 points (85.7% liked)

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