When people reach middle age, everything they are familiar with around them has secretly changed their faces.
For example, yesterday's promotion and today's face of the rice partner,
A good friend who gave birth to a child and couldn't make an appointment again,
and Starbucks, which I haven't seen for a long time and is now close to the end of the world.
Recently, some netizens have discovered that Starbucks, which once acquiesced to consumers occupying seats and resting, has now begun to implement "consumption seating".
On the coffee table, there is a sign for consumption and seating, reminding you that there are only two options for drinking coffee or leaving;
As soon as the customer sits down, the clerk asks: Hello, do you want to order?
If you don't consume your seat, you will be politely persuaded to leave, and some stores even have sockets sealed......
As we can see, Starbucks, which used to be a shopping mall stop, an air conditioning provider, a logo photo booth, is quietly withdrawing its own additional services.
Starbucks, what's wrong with you? You've become such a stranger!
Starbucks in the heart of the quarrel
Back then, Starbucks was not an element of abstract jokes, and we were still simple and normal people.
In those years, Starbucks sold not only coffee, but also space.
Open the transparent glass door with orange fluorescent lights, walk on the coffee-colored wood-grain floor, admire the pale walls, listen to old-school jazz music, and the mellow and slightly bitter coffee aroma comes to your face.
Even the female customers passing by had a strange and soft glow on their silk shirts.
Consumers buy not only a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but also a "space service" where they can rest, talk, and meet.
In those times when the spirit and material were poorer than now, people often had a subtle sense of "quietness" when they walked into Starbucks.
Starbucks, which just entered China in 1999, can be described as the top of the coffee industry and the darling of the times.
Starbucks opened a store in Beijing International Trade Center, and the average monthly salary in Beijing that year was 1,148 yuan, 38 yuan a day's living expenses, 19 yuan for a cup of cappuccino, and two cups of coffee for a day's meal.
Exquisite white-collar workers who are accustomed to high consumption are happy to go, as if they have stepped into a paradise flowing with gold and frosting.
I heard you love Starbucks? That means you're very city.
You walk up to the counter and expertly say to the clerk: I want a large caramel macchiato, for oat milk, a pump of vanilla syrup, and less ice.
If the clerk explains that we only have medium cups, large cups, and super large cups, and Starbucks' medium cups are small cups, you calmly say, "I want a big cup."
A white-collar worker sits in Starbucks, and a Buffett comes out tomorrow.
When this imagination took off, in 2010 someone summed up how to pretend to be a veteran at Starbucks.
坐在星巴克桌子旁，你至少得带本《fortune》《The economist》级别的英文杂志，敲着 MacBook。
The first sentence of the phone has to be Bonjour in French, not Hello in English.
In the years when Starbucks was in full swing, if you walked into a Starbucks, you could meet 80 groups of people to talk about entrepreneurship.
On the other side of the door, Peter always tasted a slightly astringent and bitter American style with David, chatting about channel resources and network experience.
In the end, the competition was to see who spoke first, and after a long time, the other said leisurely, "We have brought in 200 million."
Yes, the starting price of chatting at Starbucks is 100 million, otherwise you feel like you're out.
When the migrant workers passing by outside the door saw this scene, their faces seemed to be calm, but in fact, their blood was unbearable, they clenched their fists trembling slightly, and shouted silently:
Someday I can too.
Stepping on the upward elevator of the middle era, you can jump from the earth to Mars.
From 2011 to 2016, Starbucks turned itself into a showcase in the void of the golden age with a compound annual growth rate of 13.5% at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5%.
Starbucks has not only opened stores in the Forbidden City and the Badaling Great Wall, but has also opened a total of 7,093 stores in China so far. Net income in 2023 alone will be as high as $36 billion.
〓 Starbucks has been open in the Forbidden City for 6 years, and after the closure of the store, the coffee brand settled in is Luckin.
Consumers love it and love its derivatives.
A 2019 Starbucks cat's paw cup caused a storm of touting due to the cute shape of the cherry blossom pink cat's paw presented by the colored drink poured.
People lined up all night in tents to rush to buy, and in order to compete for two or three cat's paw cups that are limited to two or three per store, they fought on the spot, and the second-hand platform price was as high as four figures.
At that time, everyone did not understand, a cup, as for?
Although it is not filled with fairy water, drinking it cannot stay young forever.
But in order to appear a little more city, the first batch of Starbucks boys and girls began to rush.
As a place to pose for photos, the brand Starbucks represents the materialization of petty bourgeois fantasies.
Pick up the latest iPhone that has just been installed, pose for Furui Bai + computer keyboard, poke and poke out the neat nine-square grid and send it to the circle of friends, and then let out a sigh of relief.
You entered Starbucks and didn't take two photos to post on social platforms, which is about the same as working in vain.
After all, sometimes people don't need me to be really broad, but people need to be broad-minded.
Back then, Starbucks was a prophecy about the fulfillment of dreams, a history of the future.
The fanatical red blood, the passionate tone, the shiny glass windows, and the brown coffee aroma together constitute the vigorous and upward whispers of life.
I heard the heartbeat of an era alive.
Starbucks, besieged and beaten
Just last year, a big event happened in the coffee world -
Luckin defeated Starbucks and became the No. 1 coffee in China.
In fiscal year 2023, Luckin's revenue will be 24.903 billion yuan, and Starbucks China's revenue will be 3.16 billion US dollars.
Luckin fired a cannon, bringing embattlement to the former king of coffee, and the era of Starbucks was over.
After all, in the first round of the 9-9 low-price coffee war, Starbucks was dumbfounded.
Luckin has risen rapidly with a low-price strategy, with an operating income of 3.448 billion US dollars last year, a year-on-year increase of 87.34%, and the price of a single cup is mostly between 10 and 20 yuan, setting off a two-year 9 yuan 9 preferential activity.
Here, Cudi used 8 yuan 8 to involve the chain coffee industry in the low price tide, and the lucky coffee under Mixue Bingcheng over there directly knocked down the coffee, 6 yuan 6.
Once upon a time, Chinese consumers have been taught by Starbucks that coffee is synonymous with luxury.
As a result, looking back, Luckin had already walked into the county seat and hit the price to 9 yuan 9.
Anyway, it's all caffeine + milk + sugar, chain coffee, but it's just a liquid whip for working cattle and horses, what difference can it make if you choose a cheap one?
The coffee-drinking migrant workers pretended to pass by Starbucks and went straight to Luckin Cudi.
Starbucks is still immersed in the narrative of "introducing coffee to Chinese consumers".
Its competitors have already begun to "introduce Chinese consumers to coffee brands".
Among them, the most typical one is the collective milk tea of coffee.
The new Chinese coffee brand has given fundamentalist coffee brands some small coffee improvements.
From that year's raw coconut latte, to the sauce-flavored Moutai in the back, to the little fresh classmates, they can choose jasmine-flavored latte and Biluo Zhichun latte-
In the hands of Chinese, coffee can be sweet, it can be like milk tea, or even like tea.
Cudi started from the region and brought in Wuchang rice milk latte, which satisfied the carbohydrate stomach of most of China bit by bit.
The "Yuanyang Coffee" with a pleasant tea face, take the route of herbal tea, osmanthus oolong, gardenia maofeng, and jasmine tea are all for you.
The buffalo milk tea latte from Tims in Canada and the Camellia peanut coconut latte from Costa in the United Kingdom.
Although it lacks a little new Chinese flavor, you can also try to see that it is turning around and trying to scoop a bowl of rice in the blue ocean of so-called Chinese coffee.
In the era of new Chinese coffee, in fact, you can see that Starbucks is not without efforts.
But just like the students who started to endorse two months before the college entrance examination - it's hard to say that it's useless, but it's really not very useful.
Starbucks' Osmanthus Tieguanyin Latte has a fair evaluation, Longjing bamboo fragrance and black plum hawthorn black tea, and few people say that it is delicious.
Even if we are conscientiously working to produce new products, the perception of consumers is still:
It looks good, but for 40 yuan, I can buy two cups of Luckin.
After all, in the fourth era of consumption, once a rational consumer starts to snub you, they won't even say hello.
In this chaotic battle, other coffee brands have used 36 strategies to change into new robes, price reduction, price reduction, sinking and sinking.
This battlefield opened up by Starbucks is no longer the "high-end market" that Starbucks was familiar with at the beginning, both in terms of taste and price.
Founder Howard Schultz has always believed that Starbucks' high-end positioning will never change:
"We don't do discounts, we already have a high-end positioning in the market"
"We will not low prices, we will not roll in".
But what it does reflects the brand's strong anxiety -
This year, Starbucks secretly poked and poked low-price coupons in mini programs and live broadcasts, determined to cover 900 county-level cities, and went to the sinking market to find a growth curve.
The 360-degree attitude shift made Starbucks seem distorted.
Starbucks and QQ emoji are co-branded, which should be a strong combination, but a smiling face almost has no yin and yang to send people away.
Later, it was co-branded with "Havoc in Heaven", and as a result, cold products were pushed in winter, saying that the coffee distribution process was transformed along the way, which made people scratch their heads. In the early years, the gold body fell off the paint, the golden signboard was no longer bright, and after entering the sinking market, it changed from an office social space to a rest space for uncles and aunts. Starbucks adheres to the high-end concept and puts itself in a high position of petty bourgeoisie; When it wants to enter the sinking market, but does not understand the sinking market, it can only listen to the lively gongs and drums in the door, and hurriedly circle outside the door.
Starbucks, why doesn't it work?
We're here today to celebrate our good friend Starbucks: Welcome to the real world. In the past, Starbucks was a fashionable Westernized lifestyle, you can't call it Starbucks, you have to call Starbucks with the tip of your tongue against your teeth, and you can show its nobility. Now, it is the era of new Chinese food. The coffee is to be paired with flowers, fruits and herbs, and the hamburger has to be sandwiched with mapo tofu, Peking duck, and fish-flavored shredded pork. White rice is not good, and the Chinese's own "yellow rice" is a Chinese light food with reduced oil and salt, and even spicy hot.
White-collar workers eat new Chinese healthy rice, drink new Chinese tea coffee fruit coffee, and their food and drink are getting closer and closer to the taste of Chinese themselves. The meaning of coffee to people is also different. In the past, coffee was a reward for hard work and a luxury in life. Now, coffee has become the engine oil of young people, and it is the high-crushed tea of the new generation of migrant workers. After all, the world is a large game dungeon, and the worker NPCs have no time to go to the café, and coffee is a blue bar to replenish spiritual energy.
The 20-minute effect of going out to the park on weekdays is too strenuous, and the 20-minute effect of the workstation is just right, which can be integrated with drinking coffee and eating lunch, which is just enough to support today's KPI. Therefore, when people want to buy coffee, the first time they want to get an instant one, the second choice is Luckin and Michelle Bingcheng, anyway, they are both life-sustaining water for work, no different.
Looking up, the four-sided glass window of Starbucks was shining. In the past, it was an observation room for human behavior. Students make up homework, copy homework, and secretly make up classes here, migrant workers revise manuscripts, talk about business, and make phone calls with Party A here, school-age young people go on blind dates here, and the bride price and RV fly together; The unemployed spend their days here by pretending to go to work and actually resting at Starbucks to spend their professional sage time.
In the past, young people took "Starbucks check-in photos", and now the Z generation plays "Starbucks abstract stalks".
From rising high to finely smashing, the symbols that were once flaunted are now dissolved, and the facets of life have been exposed in this breath.
Times have changed, and we have disenchanted it.
Looking up, the translucent windows of Starbucks on all sides of glass used to shine. Now, Starbucks wants a turnaround rate, a good-looking financial report, and the ability to keep up with the pulse of the times. We used to be keen to walk into the window, but now we want to come out. Because outside the window, there is a new, bigger, choppy.
来源：凤凰WEEKLY