Brew a Better Coffee and the World Will Beat a Path to your Door

Why are people flocking to Starbucks? They seem to be springing up on every street corner, and they all seem to be successful. Starbucks sensed a void in the market and moved to fill it. Let me explain. A few years ago the world of coffee was populated by the likes of Folgers, Maxwell House etc. A few large companies controlled the whole market and what they supplied was basically caffeinated swill. There are basically 2 kinds of coffee beans: Arabica and Robustico. Robustico is cheap, plentiful and not very good tasting. Arabica is expensive, harder to grow and great tasting. Guess which kind was used by Folgers, Maxwell House et al? The cheap, bad tasting stuff, of course. They were betting that nobody would know the difference since not many people had anything to compare it with. Well, this left a void in the market for someone to come along and supply a "gourmet" coffee experience, and that is exactly what Starbucks did.

It's capitalism of the best sort, pure and simple. A better product, a better tasting coffee and pretty soon no one wanted to drink the swill provided by the large market share companies. But Starbucks didn't stop there. They not only provided a quality product, they provided a quality environment with every detail carefully thought out. The decor is consistently more decorous than competing shops; the service is exceptional. It's a high quality organization all around.

So does this prove that, when there is a void, someone will fill it? Not necessarily. But it does show that if someone has a better idea, they can make a splash in the market and pull market share away from more established companies. It does show that a higher quality product can out-compete a lower quality product with an established market share. It does contradict the dictum that lower quality products appeal to larger segments of the market. However, in the entertainment field, it seems that the opposite is true. A lower quality seems to be correlated with ease of accessibility and that is where the market flocks instead of to higher quality which is more difficult to understand.