Saturday, February 3, 2007

Blog:4 The $Bucks from Starbucks

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The place that I have chosen to observe is the infamous Starbucks. You may think that is not very original, but honestly I am not as “related” to Starbucks than most. Yes, I like their drinks but nearly not as much as some people, as you will find out. I am not even a big fan of coffee in general so that reduces my choices by a few. I chose Starbucks because I don’t go in that much and it is a huge enterprise for coffee and I want to observe why and exactly how hectic a morning in Starbucks gets. Obviously, one of the sites I researched on was Starbuck’s homepage. On their site there are several different options relating to their stores like where to find store locations, how to reload your Starbucks card, nutrition facts, and many more. They have places if you want to hear live music or you can buy retail items on the site such as shirts or coffee mugs and even coffee machines and coffee beans. This is such a great source of marketing for them, not that they don’t have enough. This site shows all the aspects of Starbucks besides just coffee. According to Starbucks Fact Sheet, I found on Wikipedia, there are a total of 12,440 locations of Starbucks Coffee in the world, that was updated November 2006. Of that total 8,830 are located within the U.S. and 3,604 are located in 36 other countries worldwide. That is incredible. Seattle is where the headquarters is for Starbucks, and on a local online news source, Seattle Pi talks about how Starbucks will most likely have as many locations as McDonalds or more. McDonald’s has around 29,000 locations throughout the world as of now, Starbucks is well on their way to reaching their goal. Another interesting site I found was the Starbucks Gossip site , a very popular site for people who love the coffee. As I tried to find out how much the average Starbucks customer spends annually on their coffee I found it was hard to find that so I found this similar fact instead. The average customer visits Starbucks 6 times a month, but the same spokesperson said that the loyal customers will visit 18 times a month. Since we are involved in blogging so much in this class, you can scroll down on the page with this statistic and see what others have to say in response. One person comments how she has a Starbucks built into her apartment complex and that she visits at least three times a day!! I guess it varies with each person, but I definitely know people that go six times a week let alone a month. Starbucks has definitely become a phenomenon for coffee and they have such a huge diverse demographic. My audience for this next observation blog is within this demographic and I know most of you have had a Starbucks coffee more than once in your lifetime. I am interested in observing all the different kinds of people that visit such a common place for a simple product of coffee, and I want to see how much people really do spend for it. There are probably questions that will be answered that I didn’t even think of when I am sitting in a local Starbucks at a peak time.

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3 comments:

Nga Le said...

Interesting place to do your observatjion on. I am not a big fan of starbucks myself, but I have been to a few starbucks. I can see why people like it. My sister loves starbucks and they serve the best coffee. For people who likes going to starbucks, I recommend them going to the new starbuck on Wadsworth and bowles. It is fairly new and is very coozy. There's two fireplace in there and lots of couches and comfy chairs. I like going there just to study. I think you choice of place is especially a good idea because your audience are college students. As you probably know, a lot of college students go there to study. That place is especially pack at night around exam weeks. It is amazing how much starbuck is out there and how much more they are building. Wow, they are catching up the McDonalds? That is pretty amazing. Nice topic!

Irina said...

Great place to research! You are right about Starbucks in one of the last sentences, we all have visited Starbucks at least once in our lifetime and most of us love it. There are some people who refuse to go to Starbucks because everyone is so addicted to it, but personally I think they are being unreasonable. It’s a good place to have coffee at, they have it on every corner and the drinks are delicious. They even have dome drive-through Starbucks locations, which I think is great especially when you’re in a hurry. But once again, great place to research and good job on describing it!

Jiarui Xie said...

I love it,hehe! Great place to observe,Fist time I went to Starbuck was in China Beijing> I do not know it was so popular in America until I came here. I found it everywhere,everyone likes it.It was amazing for a coffee shop to be out there that many. I am not a big fan of coffee too,however,I love it.The best place for coffee. I think coffee is the thing that once you begin you will never give up. Good job!