Starbucks Has a Pumpkin Spice Latte Problem in China
www.nytimes.com
For years, Starbucks was the dominant coffee chain in China. Now rivals offering local flavors and cheaper prices are crushing the company’s bottom line in its second-largest market.

Good article from the New York Times.

Summary

Starbucks China is losing customers at a very rapid pace. Starbucks corporate executives are angry. Brian Niccol, the new $100 million CEO of Starbucks, sounded the alarm in October, calling the competition “extreme”. For the Chinese Lunar year, Starbucks released a pork flavor latte. It cost more than $9 and was widely seen as a disaster.

Billionaire Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s former CEO, insisted that Starbucks would not enter a price war in China. He claimed “as chinese customers become more knowledgeable about coffee, they will want to upgrade from lower-end or discounted products”

  • renzev@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 days ago

    So I used to think that people hated on starbucks because “hurr durr real men only drink black coffee” and starbucks had extremely sugary and milky drinks that had barely any actual coffee in it. “No problem” I thought, “I like sugary drinks!”. So I went to a starbucks at the shopping mall close to where I live and ordered something and it was literally just a glass of ice cubes with like three sips’ worth of milk and syrup squirted into it. It genuinely felt like the barista forgot one of the ingredients or something. I thought it was a fluke but when I was at that mall at a different time I got a different iced coffee and it was the same stuff: glass full of ice cubes with a squirtling of syrup and milk. What even is the point!?