Starbucks

It is sometimes like this... you see something everyday during a long time and never take care about it and one day you read something about it, then pay more attention and make your own point about this thing which had just been a useless part of the decoration so far ..

That is basically what happened for me about "Starbucks" yesterday. Frankou and I went to a book store in BKK in the morning and were shocked about the number of books written during the last year about the Starbucks phenomenon! All the books seem to describe it as the typical success story, the guys who are said to manage to make every customer pay the maximum he would be willing to pay for a coffee: the poor paying for a normal coffee and the rich taking some extra stuff to reach the maximum price they would pay... I summarize but it is basically what is alledged about it with plently explaination and description of the marketing concepts serving this strategy.
We were already really skeptical about this theory!
Then we were in Sukhumvit, unlucky about our visit when we went by a Starbucks ... First of all we were surprised to find a Starbucks in such a removed area... we already thought that the omnipresent coffeeshop is maybe too omnipresent, it doesn't make sense! And we realized that both of us had almost never been in Starbucks... I used to buy some coffee for Sophia there in London, but that's it. So we went inside and begun to order...
WHAT A SHOCK ... it is fucking expensive :( I paid 185 bath for one iced tea (which was nothing more than a black tea with some ice in it... Frank had to add the sugar himself to make it taste ok) and one latte vanilla coffee small (I mean "tall" as they call it, but it is basically the small size! There again you feel fucked off).
So it took us 5minutes to decide to make a deal and promise that WE WOULD NEVER GO BACK TO A STARBUCKS, even with other people!!

Back home, my curious Frankou went to his favorite place in the world, the Internet of course, looking for some infos about the Starbucks phenomenon and he only found many articles in the news about the company having 97% less growth compared to last year and closing many of the "omnipresent" shops!

I discovered Starbucks yesterday, we found it was bullshit and today it looks like it is dead... funny story!