The Idea Behind the Starbucks Experience

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research grade: 10 University of Applied Sciences Berlin course: International Entrepreneurship language: English abstract: 1971 when the 'Starbucks experience' begun Starbucks was just a small coffee shop in Seattle USA. Today Starbucks named after the first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is the world's leading retailer roaster and brand of specialty coffee with millions of customer visits per week at stores in North America Europe Middle East Latin America and the Pacific Rim. Thuswithin not more than three decades Starbucks' offering of distinctive blend of quality coffee neighbourly camaraderie and a unique coffeehouse culture combined with an aggressive growth strategy helped it to become the most famous specialty coffee shop chain in the world and a global company: In 2007 it run more than 15000 stores worldwide by employing more than 172000 people. But in the same year 2007 - despite revenues of USD 9.4 billion - Starbucks had to report a first-ever decline in same-store sales. As early as the mid-1990s analysts had been predicting that Starbucks could not sustain such strong growth especially in same-store sales. For more than 10 years Starbucks had consistently beaten these expectations. By 2007 however Starbucks unprecedented size combined with the uncertainty of the economyhad placed the company in a new competitive game. As a result in early 2008 Starbucks announced a series of initiatives to cope with the new challenges and to prepare for a successful future - all of them based on renewing the focus on customer experience and slowing down expansion. But what constitutes the Starbucks strategy that has been that successful in the past? What were the main drives of the considerably growth of the Starbucks business? And is the Starbucks strategy flexible enough to adapt to the current challenging market conditions?After t