Is Starbucks Ruining Italy’s Coffee Culture?
What is Starbucks’ tribute to the craft of coffee — Americanising & commoditising it for the sake of shareholders?
What does it take to get inside the first Starbucks in Italy? A short walk from the Duomo cathedral in Milan, follwed by joining a long queue snaking along the side of the old post office building, and a brief wait followed by a friendly welcome from a barista (and an up-and-down glance by the security guard dressed in a sharp suit).
After all this, the golden robe is lifted and you are granted access to the Starbucks Reserve in the heart of Milano. The security guards aren’t needed of course, but they add a layer of excitement to the whole experience and double as doormen for when you enter the building.
The rope and queue are apparently because Italy limits the number of people in buildings, and for Starbucks that number is 300 people at a time. But the queue is an expert move from the coffee chain, copying fashion giants such as Dior, Chanel and Gucci, which initiated a queuing system to enter their Hong Kong stores due to Chinese customers associating queuing with scarcity. The Starbucks Reserve hopes to match the demand for exclusivity by requiring all its customers to queue outside, come sun or rain.
Today, on a Monday morning after fashion week, the queue was under five minutes, but queuing is part of the admission process to the theme park of coffee-loving adults. When you make it in, you are welcomed by another security guard opening the heavy glass door to a glistening wonderland of coffee capitalism.
Every inch of the palatial post office building is covered with novelty, delight and distraction. The music is loud and the smell of freshly roasted coffee and baked croissants overwhelms the senses.
Unlike a normal Starbucks cafe, where consumption is moved along quickly and efficiently, it’s not clear exactly where one should go and instead customers are left to roam around the store, look at displays of merchandise or sample a few coffee blends. When you finally find yourself in another queue, this time for coffee, the pastry selection demands attention and consumption.
Somehow Howard Schultz convinced Italy’s artisan baker Rocco Princi to join forces with him after a visit to the Seattle Reserve but his name is enough to signal quality and bring in the Italians, as they join the queue outside to experience a Starbucks.
“I think Italians are happy,” says one of the managers on duty, when asked what she thinks of the place. When most of the world views this new store as Starbucks forcing themselves into Italy, one of the last strongholds against the modern day coffee chains, the fact that Italians want to visit makes the extravagant Reserve seem almost wanted. No doubt the new Shanghai and Tokyo Reserves will be met with equal delight by locals, who still see the brand as fashionable and foreign, as ‘American’.
The coffee and pastries are probably the best quality options that Starbucks offers anywhere in the world, but they still don’t rival the quality of coffee and pastries elsewhere in Milan. And while the coffee wonderland is indeed a novelty, the thing that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of a coffee lover is not that Starbucks is here, rather it’s the fact that they are trying to steal Italy’s thunder:
Espresso was a gift from Milano to the rest of the world — we were merely the messengers. Opened in September 2018, this Starbucks Reserve Roastery pays tribute to the passion, science and craft of coffee found within these city streets.
Cute messages to the city are scattered all over the cafe — “spirito di Milano”, “dedicato a Milano” — but rather than paying thanks to the city by offering them something useful like a playground, monument or hospital, the move to Italy’s fashion capital is a calculated manoeuvre to claim more business for the brand, taking away business from the locals.
When each of Milan’s tourists visits the new Starbucks Reserve, how much money is filtered away from the smaller, local cafes serving up Italy’s finest coffee?
And what exactly is the tribute to the craft of the coffee — Americanising and commoditising it for the sake of the shareholders?
Other than a few Italian waiters who speak some English and Chinese, what part of the Starbucks Reserve is actually a tribute to Italy? Not very much at all.
As for the future of Starbucks in Milan, it’s probably here to stay. When a brand can afford to invest over €30 million in refitting one of the most exclusive pieces of real estates in the city into a factory that Willy Wonka would be proud of, then they can afford even to run the Reserve at a loss (one of Starbucks’ famous business models in the past for putting competitors out of business) in order to conquer the Italian cafe world.
Short of being forcibly kicked out of the country, Starbucks is here to stay in Milan. Mastercard estimated the city received over 8.4 million international visitors in 2017 so even the ‘one time visitors’ to the Reserve, such as myself, are in constant supply.
But if you decide to visit the Reserve, don’t forget to have a second coffee in a smaller, out-of-the-way cafe that Italy is famous for. Starbucks was born out of the coffee culture here, but sadly it might actually be the thing that kills the coffee culture altogether — or at least grabs the lion’s share of the profits.
