The photo on the right is the outside of a Starbucks Premium store in the Hatsudai part of Tokyo. It is the first anniversary of the store. I was at the opening a year ago.
This store is the 8th in the new category which has a leisure interior, high prices, better coffee and pastrami sandwiches along with apple pie and ice cream.
The first premium shop opened in Seattle on Capitol Hill. I was there for that one too, since my brother and sister-in-law live two blocks away. The other first 6 are in Tokyo.
This Starbucks chain subsidiary is of importance because the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was driven out of the Chairman's job for the second time and he has taken on the role as leader of the new Premium chain.
This blog is about two things: Schultz being kicked out and the Premium chain.
Schultz is a Lefty Fundamentalist and tried to force the tens of thousands of the U.S. Starbucks employees to swallow his backward Lefty ideology. At one point he asked the employees to discuss the Black Lives Matter ideology. Outside the U.S. the inherent foolishness of that proposition was too obvious to even try. Inside the U.S. it was a failure since employees know better than to discuss racial issues in a convivial business environment. China bans movies with American black actors so you can imagine how that ideology would do in Chinese Starbucks. In Europe, the Schultz demand to local stores to hire Syrians was a very unpopular idea.
Significantly, major U.S. stores have had bad sales results from embracing Lefty ideology. Target was hit worst for its transgender bathroom policy. So was Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus for their anti-Trump stands. Schultz was sensibly dumped by his board.
So Schultz took over the Premium subsidiary. From what I see, it isn’t much of a success.
Schultz lacks self critical faculties. Otherwise he would have learned by now that his global coffee success was driven by a speed-up of business that made coffee a more useful stimulant. Business speed up was due to the advent of delivery services, the Internet and portable phones. That explosion of stimulus-stimulant has probably come to an end. He now heads a high price white elephant.