Starbucks' Digital Dilemna

Starbucks’ “asks” stress neither convenience nor value pricing. They emphasize the cultivated, fair-trade, good taste of Starbucks’ customers.

For a long time, I assumed the Generic Coffee Shop aesthetic would fade, that it might just be an ephemeral trend. But it has only become more entrenched. As digital platforms have expanded, the homogeneity they cause has spread, too.

There was a time when Starbucks offered the option to sip your coffee out of a ceramic cup and eat your Danish off a ceramic plate. Two perfect details that helped bring the company’s belief to life in the place between work and home. But ceramic crockery is expensive to maintain and Starbucks did away with it, favoring the more efficient paper cup