Starbucks dumps breakfast sandwiches, looks ahead

In my Thurs­day evven­ing IS 7010 class, we keep com­ing back to Star­bucks and McDonald’s as exam­ples of dis­tinc­tive com­pe­ten­cies. Star­bucks does cof­fee and coffee-flavored milk very, very well.

As a music store, Star­bucks is not that great.  I do not under­stand why Star­bucks has to lit­ter its coun­ters and floors with CDs and DVDs for sale. Most Star­bucks cus­tomers want cof­fee, not entertainment.

In the fast-food indus­try, break­fast is bat­tle to sat­isfy some very spe­cific key suc­cess fac­tors. Cof­fee has to be hot and accept­able. The food has to be quick and rea­son­able. McDonald’s fig­ured these issues out in the 1970s and has dom­i­nated fast-food break­fast ever since.

Star­bucks has announced that the com­pany will dump its recently intro­duced line of break­fast sand­wiches before this fall. The items were sell­ing, but counter staff had to spend time microwav­ing the refrig­er­ated sandwiches.

Frankly, this idea sounded more like a McDonald’s scheme. After all, McDonald’s uses dis­tri­b­u­tion as its dri­ving force. The food can be assem­bled in the restau­rant with a min­i­mum of skill. The fac­tory plays an impor­tant part in prepar­ing the food to be shipped to each restaurant.

As McDonald’s rolls out its McCafe cof­fee coun­ters, Star­bucks is plan­ning a 19 March announce­ment of five “bold” new fea­tures. I’m won­der­ing what Star­bucks will try next. Per­haps they’ll have break­fast pas­tries that actu­ally taste good.

Tagged as: food, key-success-factors, ksf, USA