AN AQUISITION TO FURTHER EXPAND A UNIBRAND WORLD…
(…as the Starbucks big-brand machine rolls over a quality competitor…)

In a way this is a tale of two cities where, in each one, a decade or so apart, two high quality boutique enterprises took root and flourished.

The first devoted its initial efforts to just produce the best possible coffee dispensing service anywhere in Seattle. It did that so well, it soon expanded into coffee-house services in various parts of that city to meet the demand for its “brand” which it called …Starbucks. And in no time at all it was as ubiquitous in Seattle as any of the other nationally known fast-food purveyors, by cleverly working the same marketing techniques used by the wine industry. That is, applying pretentious presentation as a calculated appeal to elitist snobbishness, by calling its servers… barristas…not servers…highlighting its use of imported exotic coffees…and otherwise using foreign names for its offerings, such as…Grande Latte…(Spanish for the French…café au lait… or coffee and milk…in plain English), thus allowing it to charge higher prices for essentially the same brew one could get at a 7/11, because such marketing ploys made it a “status symbol”, particularly with those of the “upwardly mobile” demographic (i.e…Yuppies).

And we have to admit it was a very successful business model, ultimately becoming a public corporate entity as ubiquitous a big brand as any others…and now found in almost every nook and cranny in most parts of the world.

The second boutique enterprise began in San Francisco almost a decade after Starbucks was launched in Seattle. This one was simply a mom-and-pop bakery. Not a “French type” bakery, but an effort by immigrants from France to establish a real French “boulangerie” in San Francisco. Here also…quality of product…was the key to their success. There was simply no other source in San Francisco that produced truly French breads and bakery products in that city…La Boulange…as its brand was known…had arrived, but popular demand soon made it necessary to have more than just one or two outlets for its products. Unlike Starbucks, however, it had no need to come up with any pretentious marketing ploys. It was simply a high quality real French bakery and that was good enough to create and maintain a strong and steady market following in San Francisco. As far as we know, that was the limit of its ownership’s perspectives for the future of their business.

Inevitably, however, two things ultimately converged to turn both these enterprises into competitors. For Starbucks it was the need to offer collateral products to go with their coffee offerings…buns, rolls, pastries, etc. For La Boulange it was the need to offer collateral products to go with their bakery goods, that is…coffee. So in very short order, at least in San Francisco, both had competing “coffee house” outlets offering such combinations.

But it was an unequal contest because by this time Starbucks was a public international corporate behemoth, while La Boulange was still essentially just a local San Francisco enterprise which, while thriving and prosperous, and with some ideas of further expansion, mainly as a supplier to other “coffee house” purveyors, had no comparison to Starbucks. Nevertheless, in the mega-corporate world, any kind of competition, or potential competition, has to be dealt with one way or the other. Simply put, if you can’t beat them… buy them out…and that’s what happened. Earlier this summer Starbucks did just that and bought out La Boulange for a rather hefty price.

Of course, we can’t begrudge La Boulange’s ownership for cashing in as a reward for all their hard work (the size of that buyout offer being a proposition too hard to refuse), but the inevitable consequences of such an acquisition deal rarely offer any benefit either to the consuming public, or to many of the workers of the “acquired” enterprise. And now we’re seeing the impacts of that already. As of tomorrow, one of the busiest and most popular of La Boulange’s facilities in San Francisco is closing…for good. It’s not a matter of just changing the brand name from one to the other. It’s simply eliminating a competitive facility to Starbucks’ many outlets in the same area. A number of others are soon to follow, including probably the main bakery facility producing those La Boulange products.

Well, as the saying goes…there goes the neighborhood…and lord knows when anyone in San Francisco will be seeing the likes of La Boulange’s croissants, baguettes, or pain levain again… any time soon. Starbucks sure as hell has neither the expertise, intention, or savoir faire, to produce them.

Welcome to the Borg collective of a unibrand world…where choice is not an option…and resistance…is futile.

CENTURION