Thursday, July 25, 2013

So Long, Old Friends

This is the complaint I submitted to Starbucks and my final communique with them, I suppose.

I terminated the auto-reload on my card because of the changeover to La Boulange.  Of course, it doesn't bother me that you added their products to your offering - what reasonable person would be bothered by that?  However, in so doing, you took away all the good food items. 
Worse, there was basically no warning.  We just walked in one day and, boom, there was all this new stuff.  Then we tasted it and it was much, much, much worse than what you had before.  The chocolate croissant was pretty much inedible and the cookie I tried on my next visit was exactly inedible.  I threw it in the trash, which is where I feel it should have been placed before finding its way into your display case. 
Starbucks was a big part of my life.  It was a little ritual in which my wife and I have regularly engaged.  That ritual has been defiled, now, and I no longer partake.  Right now, it is difficult to imagine ever going back to a Starbucks.  Even if you got rid of La Boulange, I feel so betrayed that I'm not sure I would consider coming back. 
Goodbye.
Everybody who hates the La Boulange changeover, which is probably most of the people who think for themselves, should boycott Starbucks.  It won't change their behavior.  They're so big and have so many people snowed into believing this is a good thing that there's no way they'll pivot on this.  What it might do is amass together enough demand to create a supply-vacuum, sucking a new entity into existence that can fill the role that Starbucks once did.