Be careful how you scale your business model

Over the past year or two I’ve been getting more into coffee. This was partly triggered by my visiting the IMEX offices in Hove regularly and loving the fact that they had a proper coffee machine in the kitchen. A “proper” coffee when I went down there was a real treat and that prompted me to buy a second hand single group coffee machine for our office which has proved to be very popular.

As part of my coffee education I’ve been trying different coffees and learning more about how to steam milk properly as well as lots of other aspects of the art of coffee making.

I do also like visiting a good coffee shop and while there are some fantastic independent shops around, I do also like Costa in particular and I’ll explain why.

Some while ago I read “Pour your heart into it” which is the excellent book by Howard Shultz about how Starbucks came to be. In it they talk a lot about the whole experience of Starbucks being vital to them and Starbucks being the “third place” which isn’t work or home but is somewhere else – an escape if you like.

As far as I’m aware, Starbucks were the company that really changed the face of coffee retailing. At their peak, they were opening new wholly-owned stores at the staggering rate of up to one per day. I’ve long admired them as a company for how they treat staff and how they built a huge company by doing the right thing, being nice and providing a luxury experience that made people pay more for it than they were used to paying for a cup of coffee.

Since then in the UK at least there’s been increasing competition from other companies like Costa and Café Nero and certainly outside of London, Costa seems more prevalent than Starbucks meaning I go there more often.

Recently I was in my local Costa and got chatting to the barista about it all and she was really knowledgeable and helpful and gave me some really useful tips about what I could do to improve my skills. She also showed me how to do “latte art” – a skill I fear I won’t master anytime soon!

To contrast that I went into Starbucks today and bought a coffee and keen to learn more I started chatting to the barista there. Sadly I got the feeling that they’re not really baristas in Starbucks any more – they’re just servers who have a machine that they operate with no real knowledge of the underlying skills and techniques because they literally pressed a button on the machine and coffee came out.

She did steam the milk partly by hand because they started the first part of the steaming with the nozzle just under the milk but then they just sat the jug of milk down on the machine and left it until the machine decided it was done. I personally didn’t feel like she really understood the process of steaming the milk properly and that was reinforced when she tipped the top part of the milk down the drain before filling my cup. I do really feel that it’s a shame that Starbucks seem to have replaced the properly skilled barista with a glorified vending machine.

It may be that Starbucks have consciously taken the decision to do this because it makes it far easier to recruit and train staff at a lower cost. It also would mean that the vending machine operators (I don’t feel I can use the term barista now) are less likely to go off to the competition because they don’t have the skills but to me it feels as though they’ve compromised on their core values for convenience. If they’ve taken that decision deliberately then fair enough but I for one will be getting my luxury (and let’s face it – expensive) coffees at Costa from now on because I prefer the experience and I value the investment they have made in their baristas.

I guess the lesson here is – compromise your core values at your peril. It might be that the vast majority of the people buying coffee don’t really know or care whether the barista is properly skilled as long as the end result is “acceptable”. You can also probably roll things out more cheaply and easily to a wider audience but I can’t help wondering what else is going to be sacrificed once you start on that particular slippery slope.

I've been a bad blogger!

Yes, yes, I know - I've been a naughty blogger and I should have written more than this by now but I'm now planning on publishing more stuff and lots of shorter things that either amuse me or that I find interesting as well as attempting to write longer articles - we'll see!!