Starbucks Has a Pumpkin Spice Latte Problem in China
www.nytimes.com
For years, Starbucks was the dominant coffee chain in China. Now rivals offering local flavors and cheaper prices are crushing the company’s bottom line in its second-largest market.

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”

  • renzev@lemmy.world
    3·
    18 days ago

    It has always striked me as a rich people thing

    Fastfoods marketing themselves as luxury brand is a relatively recent trend. A decade or so ago starbacks, mcd’s, etc. really were “cheap, fast, tasty”. Fast food used to be a convenience for when you were on road trips and couldn’t make your own food.

    All these different fastfood brands built up such a large reputation around themselves that they practically became a part of our collective conscious. At some point they realised that instead of selling food, they could sell their brand. And that’s when it stopped being cheap, stopped being tasty, and generally became a “rich people” thing.