Blog Post Number 7
Diffusion of Innovations Starbucks Version
I chose Starbucks because it’s a company that everybody loves and gained quite a bit of popularity in the early 2000s/1990s and I wanted to figure out just exactly why they seemed to grow so quickly, and yet in the 2020s are having trouble keeping employees.
Pioneers (1971-1980) Starbucks was founded as a coffee, tea, and spices importing business that would occasionally serve the coffee they imported as a way for potential customers to get a taste of what they would be buying. Quickly gains popularity in the Pacific Northwest and multiple offers to expand into a chain that gets denied.
Early Adopters/Late Majority (1987-2007) Gets bought by Howard Schultz, expands from 20 stores to 100 in the US, and goes public at the very end of 1992. It had a massive international expansion in 1996 and had over 2,500 locations worldwide at the end of the decade. has a massive closure in 2007 to re-evaluate extensive procedures and find multiple chains of coffee supply companies and bakeries to rule out new products
Laggers (2007-Present) Today despite the pandemic and multiple changes in leadership Starbucks has over 32,000 stores worldwide. It is it started rolling out different concepts such as a higher-end version of its stores called Reserve Roasteries in 2019. They started training their own coffee farmers with what they call their “C.A.F.E. Principles” to make sure that the coffee is ethically sourced despite accusations of child labor, in regards to labor many Starbucks locations are trying to unionize in order to receive a fair wage and fair treatment of its employees, because of this many stores in more liberal areas are being boycotted by its customer base and outsold by other businesses in support of the unionization
References
Petruzzello, M., & Bondarenko, P. (2023). Starbucks. In Encyclopedia Britannica.
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