Original Video: • Why Starbucks Failed I... STARBUCKS FAILED IN AUSTRALIA? British Reaction To Why Starbucks Failed In Australia Australian reaction reacting to australia
We have been blessed to have Italian immigrants who came over decades ago and we started to enjoy quality coffee. Starbucks makes weak coffee that is expensive. When we have Starbucks we need to pay for an extra 2 or 3 shots to get something that tastes like coffee. For half the price of Starbucks we can get a better quality coffee.
Well unlike most American coffee, Starbucks is espresso based coffee, but it's generally made weak and from a lower grade bean. It's overpriced for a c minus grade coffee and its a general atmosphere of order and get out.
Australia has one of the strongest coffee cultures and downgrading to Starbucks wasn’t going to happen. There is a lot of “coffee snobbery” in Australia. People like to find quirky unique smaller and more personal cafes.
The experts are trying to sugarcoat it, The real reason they failed here is they sell sugary dishwater. Australia have the best coffee in the world and it is cheaper than the starbuck pig swill, so why would we buy it?
Without putting to finer point on it, starbucks coffee is crap, only tried it once when I was in the US , and bitter muddy ditchwater would have been far better. Most servos here sell far better coffee .
People don't realise that by the 1990s, Australia's coffee culture already had more in common with Italy than it did with the UK or US. Starbucks was simply a backwards step in what we were used to.
Actually- having decent coffee goes way beyond the 1990s. Many small towns had cafes owned or run by Italians or Greeks in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe the coffee was not as good as it is today, but espresso coffee and cappuccinos were a thing back k then.
Aussies want good coffee based on espresso, but Starbucks don’t sell coffee, they sell desserts! All fast food franchises sell dessert drinks, we don’t need more of them. Plus we are more health conscious so Italians and Greeks taught us how to make great coffee and we’ve been drinking it locally ever since!😊
@@jimmyriddle5246 My family and friends all eat healthy foods. Maybe young people are doing the American fast food thing. Even Macca’s sell some attempts at healthier options but I don’t go there.
Australia has the best coffee in the world and Starbucks was rubbish. I live in a country town and we have so many cafes with excellent coffee!! I meet my lovely aunt every Wednesday at one of our favourite cafes and we sit and have a coffee (me) and tea (her) and talk about whatever. I look forward to it every week and the coffee is divine.
Australians DEMAND quality coffee not American crap. If it made good coffee, it would have succeeded, not that anyone in England would understand what good coffee is. England was the only country in the world with worse coffee than the US. We spent six weeks there searching everyday and found one decent coffee in the entire time. Poms we met told us Costa was good and we were appalled by that.
Us Aussies are not going to 'develop a taste' for -Starbucks- crap coffee. Why would I pay $4,70 for a Starbucks poor attempt at a flat white when I had a wonderful flat white yesterday at the Vintage Cafe Toowoomba for $4.50. Way better than Gloria Jeans as well, which is okay coffee.
We're coffee snobs! And we are really fussy about our coffee. Starbucks seems push syrupy stuff and when they first came to Adelaide, there were a lot of kids who went there but they soon lost customers. We have a huge a huge number of coffee shops ...99 percent of them have really good coffee and snacks. Why go to a same-old/same-old generic type over-hyped coffee shop. Adelaide shop lasted about a year, I think.
That's because we love good coffee & we have great coffee shops everywhere. I wouldn't go into a Gloria Jeans either but they at least do look less like a fast food joint. As for American coffee style... it's not what we like over here in Australia.
No need for the question mark in the title. Starbucks failed here. The answer is easy - Australians historically preferred tea to coffee. The post-WW II influx of Italian migrants brought with it espresso coffee, and it was that which won over the Australian market. Australians enjoyed espressos and by the mid-1950's there were espresso bars in city centres, suburbs and across country towns. The style of coffee was Italian. Starbucks came here with a half century later with grand headlines of how it was going to introduce coffee to Australia. It was not just later, it was too late. Starbucks had a huge range of what were called coffees, but to Australians, what was on sale was not the coffee they had come to enjoy. Most of us gave Starbucks a try, and did not like what was served. We gave a second try just in case something was not going well on the first occasion. That made it clear that the answer was simple - Starbucks was not selling coffee in the style Australians liked. Starbucks persisted in the hope of winning people over, but the hope was vain. People stayed with their favourite coffee bars where they served coffees in the style they had enjoyed, and where they were welcomed by the owner. Most outlets were closed, and the few remaining are in areas where they might get business from US visitors.
Had Starbucks in the US and their coffee was not only terrible but they had no clue how to make a cappucino. They thought 30% froth was OK - and many Americans seemed to be ordering cold beverage drinks which Aussies rarely purchase at a cafe.
Ironically, McDonalds set up a Starbucks-rival, McCafe, where the coffee is served along traditional Australian lines. There was a laneway full of restaurants they showed a couple of times (DeGraves St, near Melbourne’s main railway station)…absolutely nobody would buy Starbucks coffee when there’s great coffee in nearly every cafe. They put one in Lygon St in Carlton, Melbourne’s Italian mecca…it’s heresy…the only people you’d see were Asian tourists. We don’t want 20 oz of sugary dishwater…300ml of good coffee is enough. McDonalds is one of the few American fast food outlets that hasn’t failed here. Subways had to leave and come back, Denny’s failed, Taco Bell failed. Domino’s is nothing at all like the US product. Pizza Hut used to be ok, but delivery only now.
Australia was less impacted by the 2008 GFC than most other countries - the government injected cash into the economy at just the right time so it's wrong to blame GFC for Starbucks demise in Australia though it could have contributed. Most Aussies will never go to Starbucks in Australia because the country has so many better options for better coffee everywhere. Gloria Jeans does proper coffee so is a better choice than Starbucks but still quite low on most Aussies' preference list. McDonalds' McCafe started in Melbourne to get a part our coffee culture. Their coffee is reasonable, ok for a quick grab and run. Hungry Jacks (Aussie branch of Burger King) tried to copy but their coffee is crap.
"Starchucks do nice coffee" ? Nah. Aussies like coffee & Starchucks don't do coffee. All the excuses from them were just wrong & show how arrogant & out-of-touch they were. They didn't change so paid the price. Their products are just awful.
Starbucks motto in Australia...to all Americans especially, come drink the same crap you always have, because if you try proper coffee here,you still can't get that at home.
Starbucks coffee has a very weak taste where our cafes in Australia sell coffee from artisan roasters and at a stronger strength than American tastes. Most of them were so full of sugar and calories for our tastes as well. Gloria Jeans were similar and likewise, not as popular as our local cafes and so they have also been struggling to stay in the market. Our coffees are quite expensive so I think Australians are more selective as to where they buy their coffee. We were definitely spoiled by the Italians and Greeks when it comes to great food and great coffee.
Starbucks coffee has the reputation of being third rate for a lot of Australians, apart from a bunch of people who like it. We have access to a lot of top coffee blends and have been drinking the beverage for a long time. The culture of Starbucks is also quite different to Australia.
USA and Starbucks in particular just don’t understand coffee. Too watery, in contact with the beans for too long, extract too much bitterness so they overpower the coffee taste and bitterness with sugary flavoured syrups. So glad that we grew up with the Italian style of coffee. They have the process refined to extract the best flavours. Quality over quantity please!
Aussies know the brand, HMV because we all have their old 78rpm records - His Master’s Voice - we even had the old gramophones, I grew up with all of that.
I went to a starbucks when they first opened a store near me ... OMG ... it was awful - so supersweet YUKINESS ... urgh! One cup of coffee was enough. You couldn't even kid yourself that you were drinking coffee! Yes, I go to Gloria Jeans a lot!
@michaelfranzau Maybee. Nevertheless in Queensland some of us have been PNG gold since before ww1. People forget about all the coffee plantations started in the 1890s in New Guinea 🇵🇬. Not to mention all of the ones started even hair in Indonesia and East Africa. Love all that bullshit about who started what. Sophistry. I am still drinking PNG gold for my morning cup of Joe. Enjoy your ditch water.
I make better coffee at home than Starbucks offered. One coffee from them was enough for me. No cafe will last long if they don’t do good coffee at a reasonable price. I have only a tiny on-street shopping precinct in my suburb but there are three cafe choices. Also, they really sugar coated the reason for failure and the GFC was a weak excuse because Australian didn’t have a recession, we just hated their coffee. In fact we haven’t we haven’t had a Recession in 30 years.
Much like Costco. They don’t understand the market We don’t like jumbo jars of things and bulk buying, homes are not as big as US homes Also like Starbucks, lots of fatty and sugary high processed products
We have cafes everywhere on each corner whether in the cities, suburbs or bush towns & the good thing about that is if ur not keen on the coffee on one corner then next time try the coffee on the next corner until u find the coffee u love. We do drink a f**k tonne of coffee, no matter the type or style, coffee is our non alcoholic grog lol
Starbucks coffee is utter crap. Reason it failed is simple: they expected us to pay a higher price for an inferior product; and to just waltz in here with such arrogance offended us. They say we didn't care when they closed stores. In fact we applauded the retreat with a bronx jeer, "good riddance!" How pathetic that the only way they can keep anything open over here at all is to solely target tourists who've never tasted decent coffee. Such a pity you don't have Gloria Jean's over there. Once you taste decent coffee, you'll never go back.
Apparently we love our coffee here in Australia, but I hate coffee lol. I only drink tea, & like Americans I could never walk down the street with a cup of tea in a paper cup - yuk lol. I prefer my cuppa in a proper cup and saucer in a small local coffee shop where they grind their own beans or you pick the variety of tea you like - and all the cakes are home made by the owners Greek mother and mother in law in a local cafe - either inside or out in the sunshine in their outdoor cafe. - It’s an outing, an experience, a time for a catch up with friends, talk and joke to the owner you know by his first name and a quick chat to the staff 😊 That’s how I like my cup of tea 🍵
Starbucks makes coffee flavoured drinks full of aerated cream [yuk] and coffee that tastes like dishwater. Gloria Jeans is not much better, but I think they were successful because they opened stores in unfashionable suburban shopping centres where there is a bit of cafe drought. My local mall had a Gloria Jeans for years as the only cafe, now 2 other cafes have opened there and Gloria Jeans is gone. YAY!! now there is a cafe to get a decent coffee at my local mall.
In 2024 now there are barely any Gloria Jeans left either. The local cafe rules in Australia. Your barista knows your name your coffee and has a friendly banter with you while you wait. It’s brilliant.
Aussie here. We’re used to great Italian styled coffee. It’s like eating in French and Italian restaurants, then going to the local McDonald’s. Maccas has its place, but it’s a whole other league. Unless they were willing to up their game they wouldn’t have achieved the same success.
In Britain, we are used to drinking brown dishwater, and call it coffee. Australia and New Zealand have great coffee. New Zealand calls itself the home of the flat white.
The remaining Starbucks stores in Australia are in high-tourist areas and cater to tourists yearning for something that is familiar to them. They've also tried more recently to influence Australia's taste for coffee by entering into supermarket sales with Starbucks branded coffee products, but that's not going too well for them either. It's not working because trying to sell Starbucks coffee to Australians is a bit like trying to sell canner quality beef to people that are accustomed to eating prime waygu. It's just not going to work.
In Switzerland it's only the tourists who drink Starbucks coffee. All the locals go somewhere else for decent coffee. A similar thing happened in Australia but there even the tourists knew they could get better coffee elsewhere.
Apart from Starbucks's coffee being crap , a lot of Aussies would rather support a small locally -owned and run small business rather than a big foreign corporation which pays shareholder dividends to Americans. Our country town of 70,00 has up to a dozen cafes and a Gloria Jeans. From what little I've bothered to observe as I go past , Gloria Jeans's customers tend to be teenagers with less discriminating palates and not yet aware of the small v. big business issue. My teenage daughter was one , but now a young adult she makes her own at home or goes to a small cafe. Plenty like her I think.
Im surprised you never heard of gloria jeans, its a major coffe shop in a handful of countries which australia and the USA are the most notable examples. Funnily enough the first one to open in australia is in my local shopping centre of westfield miranda back in 1996 and now you are garunteed to see one in every major shopping centre. The biggest reason why they were successful here is because it was brought over by 2 aussies that knew our coffee culture and adapted the franchise to suite the market whereas starbucks came in without taking into consideration the market.
I am fussy about my coffee. It takes myself and my mates awhile to train a young server to make it just right. When they do, they generally get it right every time. 2 weeks on an American cruise ship was great expect for the disgusting coffee.
I'm an Australian, and Starbuck's coffee would be the most disgusting coffee I have ever tasted. I've had a lot of coffee in my life as I'm already retired
I remember getting starbucks in 2007, nasty stuff, even with all the sugar they put in it, it’s still nasty no flavour. That’s was not coffee and don’t get me started on the fluffy flavours.
In Western Australia there is the Dome chain. Reasonable coffee, open until 9pm or so, has food, and also excellent locations, preserving some old buildings and some around very pleasant beaches and rivers.
Maccas definitely cornered the takeaway market for coffee before anyone else could. Not much else i can say here that a bunch of other Aussies haven't already said. Starbucks was arrogant to think what it had was better than what we had when they didn't even look at what we already had. It showed, because if they HAD they would have realised they had to actually compete. Instead they thought, "we'll just go in and be us and everyone will think we're fabulous, without us having to try." We're very sensitive to arrogance here, especially American arrogance.
I agree! If they had bothered to do any research on the coffee and café culture here, they would have either not bothered or completely changed the menu and business plan. They were so arrogant that they just waltzed in with no background studies regarding our likes, dislikes and habit of sitting and enjoying our coffee and a chat, often with a nice homemade cheesecake etc., and expected us to like their crap (which does not deserve to be called coffee). And it’s the arrogance that makes me cross more than anything. They had absolutely no idea what they were up against here and treated us like schmucks with no taste. 🤣🤣🤣
Just another case of even large companies being able to fall victim to the classic American assumption that the rest of the world is either exactly like the US, or really wants to be. Was a similar story here in the UK, when Coca-Cola tried to sell their bottled tap water, Dasani. Expensive failures.
Australia is the centre of the coffee universe. Imagine Starbucks is Kia, and you go to Monarco where tge average familiar is a Ferrari... Now you know.
McDonalds coffee is nicer,quicker and cheaper if you want a take away coffee . Even 7/11 is better. Aussies love to socialise over good quality coffee and a nice meal. Like smashed avocado and toast or bacon and eggs ECT. We like to sit, relax and chat over a good coffee
@@matthewcullen1298 Yeah agree! WON'T touch their 'food', but will go a latte or 2 from the cafe! It's way BETTER than the stewed SWILL they used to serve at the counter!
@@Urbanfisho I'm a tradie and have their food occasionally while on the go and in a hurry but as I get older I really struggle to come at eating it. My misses was a professional chef for 18 years and I've become accustomed to eating good quality healthy food. Would much rather subway or Guzman and Gomez. Or the local bakery..
@@matthewcullen1298 Good move! I'd LOVE to marry an ASIAN chef! I can't come at anything Mexican! Total stodge, & I H8 stodgy food! Proper bakery is always nice! A fresh pie or pasty & a nice latte always goes down WELL!
The last American ambassador to Australia said, as she was preparing to leave, that the thing she was going to miss the most was the Australian coffee. Nothing anywhere near as good in America.
I was in the States 2 years ago for a few weeks and the most of coffee there was either over sweeten or burnt, It was overpriced crap. Like a lot of US brands they think they are gods gift and expected the locals here to love it. As mentioned In the video only Starbucks here now are near airports and in high tourist areas where they know no better
Starbucks coffee in Australia is crap. In NZ and the UK, they sell my favourite espresso in the world. At home I don't even consider going into a Starbucks.
Foreign cultures developed Australian taste, franchise is cheap n nasty but over-priced for what it is, maccas on the other hand is unique as it’s plastic food, & no one else can make it.
Starbuck seem to source their beans from South America, hwereas coffee beand i Australia are more likely to come from Vanuatu, PNG or even Northern Australia and have a vasltly differenr and better taste.
Im an Australian, the takeaway coffee at Starbucks isn’t as nice as the takeaway coffee than I can buy from the 7 Eleven for much cheaper. Interestingly the people that I see going into and exiting Starbucks in Sydney always tend to be foreigners.
Even McDonalds had to learn how to make coffee the Aussie way when they introduced coffee to their stores. Everyone hated their coffee and they had to train their staff as baristas to survive. They even surveyed Aussie customers on their coffee until they got it right. Something Starbucks didn’t learn. Also Aussie baristas make big bucks overseas selling espresso coffee culture because they make great coffee and run great cafes.
Starbucks coffee is terrible. Australian's have a very high expectation of what they want from a coffee cafe. Starbucks caters to uniformity and satisfying an expectation. That expectation is that every Starbucks will be the same and what Americans are use to. The small independent coffee outlet is the king in Australia. But for why Starbucks crashed is they built to many outlets that ate into each other's area. There are still some Starbucks but Australians prefer to get their coffee from someone more sophisticated. Gloria Jeans isn't that great either. It is where you go if you cannot get anything better.
Starbucks in my home town 🇦🇺, didn’t last a year, so why has it taken off in the UK? The answer is Costa, bought a Costa coffee at a motorway services, one sip on the way to the car and threw it away, should never be allowed to be called coffee
There is a quick drive in coffee service... McCafe. MacDonald's does provide it and in the mornings you see them lining up. Most enjoy the menu because it is tailored to the Aussie taste.
Maccas still has a way to go with their coffee. I once went to get a coffee at a Maccas because they had a real coffee machine visible. I didn't know it was only for show. The coffee I got was made out of sight and was shite. I'll never get another one in that outlet again.
Starbucks provided both poor quality coffee and also coffee which was far too sweet and we (Australians) could always get better and cheaper coffee at local cafes and at home.There are still a very few Starbucks here but generally only tourists go to them as they are used to that style.
Starbucks are kidding themselves, I've experienced Starbucks coffe in the US, UK and various Asian countries and it cannot compete with the quality and real coffee taste provided by the average coffee joint in OZ. American coffee is less than second rate.
