Ubiquity to go

Profile Starbucks - the coffee chain opens four 'communities' every day, and Dublin is due to get at least one by the end of the year. The streets may be spilling over with coffee shops but we seem to still want more. Starbucks plans to serve us up another 30 - with a frothy smile, writes Shane Hegarty

How many Starbucks coffee shops are there now? It's hard to be sure because it is hard to keep up. They wink into existence every few moments. Another may have opened while you read that sentence. And another while you pondered that likelihood. Its appetite is voracious, its ambition insatiable. It arrives in clusters to choke competition, spreads at a staggering rate. It resembles a corporate virus. We are about to be infected.

At last count there were about 9,200 outlets in 32 countries. That's not enough for Starbucks. It has revised its long-term target upwards to 30,000 and this year alone it will open 1,500 new stores. It wants to continue its trend of at least 20 per cent growth a year. There are towns in which a Starbucks outlet sits on either side of the same street. Anchorage, Alaska has three coffee shops per 10,000 people. In London, there are 167 branches within five square miles of Regent's Park. There is a Starbucks in Beijing's Forbidden City. The company has coffee houses in Oman, Cyprus and Saudi Arabia. There is one in Belfast.

There are three in Dublin, Ohio. But there are none in Dublin, Ireland.

Finally, though, and after several years of speculation, Starbucks is coming to the capital. It will open on College Green, and is rumoured to be looking at several other venues with an ultimate target of opening 30 coffee shops here. A spokesman told The Irish Times this week that Starbucks is looking forward "to becoming part of this dynamic city with its vibrant cafe culture". Its critics will nod sagely at that, and then remind you that one morning you will wake up and find a Starbucks in your kitchen.

Starbucks is known for its ubiquity, but might prefer to be known for its coffee and its ethos. The company engages in what Naomi Klein has called "pseudo-spiritual marketing": selling itself as a lifestyle rather than a brand, suggesting that it has some sort of spirit that transcends ordinary brands. Its selling point is "community", of its outlets being a "third place" between work and home. In its stores are armchairs and newspapers and its music policy is strictly jazz.

At the counter, a couple of things strike you. First, that the assistant will smile at you with such intensity it can be intimidating. Second, that the menu resembles a code the Enigma machine would struggle to crack. Starbucks forces you to speak that ersatz lexicon of the coffee-house. There is no small, regular or large in Starbucks. Instead espressos come as tall, grande or venti.

Its menu is bewildering: Chantico, Espresso Macchiato, Caramel Macchiato, Mocha Valencia. They begin to sound like something other than coffees. What are you driving these days? A nippy little Chantico. Who are United playing in the Champions League? Mocha Valencia.

"Our success comes down to the way we connect with our customers, our communities, our farms, with each other," insists incoming CEO Jim Donald. "We just had a four-day leadership conference. The theme was human connection. We didn't once talk about sales and profits."

Yes, but when you have annual nett revenues of $5 billion (€3.89 billion), discussion about profits shouldn't be conducted amid anything other than hysterical, disbelieving, elated laughter.

STARBUCKS WAS RATED as the fourth most influential brand in the world last year, sandwiched between Ikea and Al-Jazeera. The Economist coined the phrase "Lattenomics" when judging whether a currency is at a "correct" level against the dollar by comparing the cost of a Starbucks tall latte across the world. The cheapest is in Bangkok, 30 per cent undervalued against the dollar exchange rate. In Switzerland it is most overvalued, just as it is on the similar McDonald's "Burgernomics" index.

That hints at why the arrival of Starbucks is greeted with much revulsion by critics. And why, when the World Trade Organisation met in the Starbucks hometown of Seattle in 1999, Starbucks received special attention from rioters. It has become an icon of US cultural and economic imperialism; its cartoon mermaid logo a green and white symbol of global homogenisation (the mermaid, by the way, has been altered over time to cover her naked cartoon breasts).

Type "Starbucks" into Google and immediately after the official website you will find I Hate Starbucks. Then a blog dedicated to keeping an eye on "America's greatest drug dealer". Then a page cataloguing all those streets and shopping centres with two or three Starbucks within metres of each other.

While it makes big donations to charity, the company has attracted particular attention from Fair Trade lobbyists who demand better rates for coffee producers. Starbucks says it now represents 20 per cent of all US locations in which Fair Trade coffee is sold and that in paying $1.20 (€0.93) a pound it compares favourably with the Fair Trade minimum of $1.26 (€0.97).

The Fair Trade supporters, though, point out that Starbucks pays the middlemen the $1.20 (€0.93) and not the farmers.

THE MAN BEHIND the company's success, however, has always maintained that he takes corporate responsibility seriously. Howard Schultz (51) is entirely self-made, having been brought up in a public housing project. He was a salesman with Xerox, before joining Swedish kitchenware importer Hammarplast. While working there he first encountered a Seattle company, Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice store.

Having established his own chain of espresso bars, Il Giornale, he bought Starbucks in 1987 and triggered its relentless spread.

Schultz has fostered its reputation as a decent employer.

"I grew up in a working-class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for."

It is not, though, a company you would want to work against. It opens in clusters and, because it does not franchise, it can allow cannibalisation: while individual stores lose sales, the company's overall share grows. It often establishes itself in a country by buying an existing chain and launching from there. It has been reported as buying up empty retail space simply to frustrate competitors.

We will not have to wait long to see its impact in Ireland. It enters a sandwich and takeaway coffee market estimated to be worth €250 million and currently led by O'Brien's, Insomnia, Café Sol and West Coast Coffee.

It arrives at a time when you hardly need to go 10 paces to find a cappuccino. There has been a frenzy of growth to keep up with the sudden taste for coffee in a nation traditionally dominated by tea drinkers and it would seem to be a market reaching saturation point. The arrival of a global brand to Ireland is not new, but while there is consumer hunger for Ikea or B&Q, Starbucks will not only squeeze yet more coffee shops in between existing ones but will bring higher prices.

THEN AGAIN, STARBUCKS is always being told that it has gone too far, that the market is overcrowded, the streets already running with coffee. Yet, it keeps growing, spreading inexorably across the globe.

By the end of today, there will be another four Starbucks on the planet. By the end of next week, another 29.

"There are 165,000 miles of US roadway that we haven't tapped," says Jim Donald. "We're just scratching the surface in China. We're not in India, but we're looking at it."

And there will still be another couple of hundred countries left to conquer. And four major oceans and seven seas.

I'll have a grande skim Tazo Chai Latte to go. And a one-way ticket off planet Starbucks.