[寻求翻译]How To Compete With Starbucks 如何与星巴克竞争

Dear cyber reader, Let’s start with an observation
regarding a very successful hamburger franchise called
McDonalds. Why are people walking in their doors on a
global scale? Is it their gourmet food, personal service,
intelligent counter help conversant in the native tongue of
the host country? No, of course not.

It is, in part, that you know what you are going to get, (or in my case
my kids know what they are going to get), how long it will take, and
how much you will need to pay, combined with a convenient location.
But there is also a subconscious message being delivered, a little warm
nugget of reassurance buried deep in your mind: you are safe and your
not going to be poisoned. Acres of stainless steel, hightech
cash

registers and the smell of Simple Green wrap you into gently against the
great bosom of the corporate mothership.

This is what corporate food and coffee concepts do very well. They are
ubiquitous and reassuring. So to begin our analysis we will talk about
professionalism in your service, presentation, and cleaning standards so
that you can begin to gather customers from the corporate mothership.
Along the way we will analyze Starbucks coffee style, location acumen,
sense of place, and quality of service and offer you, the talented
independent, tools to defeat them on every front. Competition is one of
the things that make the States have such a vital economy, so let’s kick
some booty.

The Mothership—Corporate security

The basics of a reassuring business to buy food or coffee from include
clean professional looking staff. To compete with Starbucks you must
have staff in clean clothes practicing clean habits: Hand washing before
work, hair tied back if long and very clean, minimum piercings, clothes
very clean and not ripped out, rags and work areas as clean as your
volume allows.

To inspire confidence you must honor your posted hours, always. At
Vivace this means two separate brewing stations each equipped with a
LaMarzocco three group ready to go. If my machine breaks I have a
backup.

I own fifteen coffee grinders to run two stores.

Floors, brewing equipment, windows and tables all must glow with
cleanliness, and exude a clean smell from last nights scrub down.
You do not have to make everything sterile. It can be used looking but
CLEAN. For example we allow our ripped out stools to be taped up a
couple of times before replacing the tops and all our tables are funky
dinette models, each one a different shape and color, a charming used
look makes people comfortable to bring in the kids.

To attack the corporate entity on their strong turf, the subliminal
reassurance that the customer is safe, will require discipline and work.
In the end you will exude professionalism only if you are a professional
in your approach and the customers will perceive it subliminally. You
must focus and learn from your years of experience how to keep a
professional coffee house. Perhaps Starbucks has raised the bar a bit
here I think.

Coffee Style—Caffe au Lait

Espresso preparation is a very complex culinary art and the basis of all
of our efforts is fresh coffee. If you have many stores depending on a
central roasting plant you must warehouse the roasted coffee to meet
surges in demand. So larger corporate coffee chains are especially
vulnerable to staleness because of their size.

In espresso we have a spectrum of roasts to choose from. In the north
of Italy you find coffee beans of a deep mahogany brown but with no oil
on the surface of the fresh coffee. This, for espresso is towards the light
end of the Italian spectrum and features very heavy body and the highest
development of caramelized sugars. As you edge up towards
Switzerland we see cinnamon colored roasts showing up and the
espresso is acidic and grassy, not really an espresso roast. Down
through Naples we see darker roasts with a light sheen of oil on the
surface of the fresh coffee and the espresso ristretto is pulled very short
to avoid bitterness. It is an axiom of espresso roasting that the darker
you go bitterness increases, while acidity decreases. The Northern
Italian style strikes the best balance, avoiding acidity in many varietals,
while developing the highest concentration of caramelized sugars with
almost no bitterness.

Starbucks has chosen very dark roasts to be their defining style. This is
very smart for a large chain because darker roasts offer a stable
recognizable flavor, carbon, which is easy to reproduce consistently on
an espresso machine. Even as it becomes stale the dark roast bite will
remain stable in the bean. They can choose any varietal coffee and brew
it through a wide range of temperatures and brewing times and come
out with that signature burnt taste that the customer expects. More
subtle roasts, featuring a high content of caramelized sugars, are
notoriously finicky in their preparation demands. Equipment must be
clean, barista skills must be at a very high level, grinder burrs
sharp…and on and on to get a consistent flavor. But that flavor has the
potential for sweet richness.

In the wider world of coffee traditions Starbucks is offering French
Caffe Au Lait, a coffee style that has been part of a traditional breakfast
in France for decades. Very dark roast coffee or espresso served in a
bowl of milk. As a style it will stand the test of time for the morning
coffee.

Their dark roast is also very smart from a marketing point of view.
Starbucks is often going into markets where the espresso, if present,
was weak and astringent. Or they are the first to develop a market
where people having been drinking office coffee or franchise drip coffee.
The clever part is that their customers will identify Starbucks as having
“strong” coffee because of the pungent flavor of the burned beans.
They are an excellent first wave of espresso marketing to penetrate a
region and introduce people to something different. To compete, offer
an alternative style to their customers. The Achilles heel of the dark
roast traditions is that because of the intense bitterness these roasts need
to be served with a lot of milk, and perhaps syrups or a slushie, to be
palatable. The adult body does not need sixteen ounces of milk just to
enjoy a cup of coffee. Caffe au lait is really only a breakfast style of
coffee drink.

A Northern Italian espresso roast tastes best, if you can learn to prepare
one well, with milk in a ration of 1:1, espresso macchiato, to no more
than 5:1 such as in a cappuccino. In regards to espresso these traditions,
along with espresso ristretto, the digestivo after a meal, will stand the
test of time and give you hearty business throughout the day. Well
prepared caffe espresso has the quality of being very gentle on the
bodies digestive system and nervous system. For these reasons it is not a
fad but a culinary trend. What we see after thirteen years of serving a
Northern Italian style is more people migrating towards espresso
macchiato and straight espresso in our shops.

And, as I have pointed out in countless seminars, it is the perfect small
business niche because true Italian espresso preparation is so demanding
that it will require all your focus over time to master it. Stay small to
compete. Use your focus, and stick with one shop to master a subtle
espresso roast and you will begin to achieve converts, en masse.

Sense of Place

Howard Schultz is very smart to design his Starbucks stores to be a
third place for the community to gather and be a community. This plays
well in the suburbs of the US because there really are no alternatives
available to people that are not franchise establishments. But for hip city
residents hanging out at a Starbucks is like…well…hanging out at a
Starbucks.

A corporate coffee bar, despite armies of architects, has no soul. It has
no presence that will focus and imbue the place with a personality over
time, it has no spark no anima. The staff will be a rotating ensemble of
people who are not from here and have no real commitment to the
place. This is the great hammer of the independentyou
have a soul and
you can infuse your little coffee shop with that soul. And, the American
people want to know a place and be part of a real scene, not some
cookie cutter clone that reeks of all the other clones fallen from the
business school womb in a pastel pile of blonde wood and green logos.
Over the years I have certainly blabbed on enough about the Vivace
charter, trying to perfect the espresso process in my store, long enough.
My places reflect my perfectionism and addiction to sensuous beauty in
our espresso, art, decor and equipment. Another example of a place
with a real soul was The Last Exit on Brooklyn run by Irv Cisky when I
was a student at the University of Washington.

Irv broke all the above rules, the bathroom required a gas mask to enter,
the filth on the floor would be of high archaeological significance in it’s
early strata, and the coffee was ground fresh that week and sitting in a
big glass bowl and the barista would scoop it out with a small plastic
spoon. I had a mochaonce
or twice.

But that place had major soul because it was the haven of a serious
subculture in Seattlethe
Chess Players were there. Yassir Seriwan
learned to play at those beatup
wooden tables. Sitting there reading,
the click of speed chess timers resonated off the smoke streaked
windows like being in a big greasy pop corn machine. Irv’s concept was
to reproduce the espresso bars of Brooklyn, I do not know if he did
that, but he sure created a place with a gritty style and the chess
community just loved it. Irv did well, with his prime location leased
from the UW, until he died and then the school used the spot for an
office building.
We yearn for some soul in the places we hang out. (Maybe not
grittyurbanpetridishsoul)
but at least some individuality. Lack of soul
is a big weakness of the corporate concepts.

Location

These guys at Starbucks are seriously good at locating coffee bars. Just
open your coffee bar next to one.

Quality of Service—A vending machine

As Starbucks gets bigger they have begun to brew espresso in super
automatic machines that grind and brew the shot. This allows them to
save money on training staff and labor costs in general. When you
remove the art of espresso brewing from the job description you finally
arrived at a nothing job. Being a cashier and pastry handler is not a job
with any rewards in it really. We get and hold good staff by challenging
them to brew to our standards and training them for years in a subtle
and beautiful culinary art. And it shows at the counter I think. Our
people are engaging because the job we require is engaging. If you can
make onto staff at Vivace you are somebody, and it shows in the
customer interaction.

At McDonalds you deal with different staff all the time and many have a
minimum grasp of the English Language, can the “Bucks be far behind?
Minimum wage help gives you minimum service. The corporations try
hard. They install and motivate managers very well to try to infuse the
place with soul and a service ethic that recognizes the regulars, but they
are self defeating. No talented manager wants to waste their career on a
staff of minimum wage cashiers and pastry handlers. Managing is an art
as well and the good manager, (a real people artist) wants a complex
challenging staff they can motivate over time, not revolving door of
minimum wage students.

Your r style as an independent must include memorizing your regular
customers orders, complete with nuances of extra foam or not too hot,
as quickly as possible. Your service style must acknowledge your
regular customer as an important part of the life of your coffee shop. In
your service this is an important way to differentiate your self from the
corporate bars, know your customers and let them be a part of the shop
any way you can. Whatever that style will be it must also be welcoming
to new customers.

What we prefer for bar style at Vivace is efficient attentiveness with not
too much superfluous chit chat. We make our customer feel welcome by
earnestly doting over them with much compassion for the nuances of
exactly what they like in their coffee, and then remembering those
nuances very accurately.. We feature less chat, more hat, and always
with good speed. (To compete with Starbucks on pure speed a
customer should never wait longer than seven minutes for their coffee.)
What I believe is in this way we are approachable on a daily basis for
our regular customers for many years, and we avoid barista burnout
at the same time.. The customers that really want more social interaction
at the bar are free to lead those conversations and will often uncover an
insightful wit in their barista, I am just painfully aware, however that
three quarters of the word twit is wit. It is just a matter of our style,
based on what bugs the owner, me. It gives us a personality over time.
So in the end it is the focus and personality of the independent coffee
shop owner that will give you a competitive edge over corporate coffee.
Does this mean that Irv with The Last Exit could make it in Seattle
today? No chance. Irv’s filthy place with crappy coffee and a smoky
atmosphere was one of the first espresso joints in Seattle. The chess
players were probably attracted to the “Bohemian Chic”
atmosphere( you know where more dirt equals philosophical enlightenment through the implied rejection of materialism.) Today a host of good independents and a slew of corporate coffee bars surround
every college campus, he would have no chance of getting established.
For a city is this a good thing or a bad thing?I am sure I do not know.

But I favor competition leading to excellence in coffee and service.
Soul alone is not enough. It is really the focus on espresso excellence
and personal, intelligent service that is the edge over the big
corporation, provided the independent can do everything as
professionally as the big boys do it. Starbucks is a wakeup
call to those dabblers that think the coffee business is easy and I say that is good. We
do not want to go the way of the yogurt shops of the eighties. They will
force us to create a culture of espresso excellence to survive.

Ciao for now!

David C. Schomer
Owner, Espresso Vivace