McMermaid

I enjoyed reading the LA Times article "Selling Coffee Becomes Diacritical for McDonald's". It's an insightful telling of the irony in the Golden Arches' latest ad campaign ("McCafe"), the fast-food giant's attempt to gain ground on Starbucks at the same time Starbucks has clearly mcfranchised its way to becoming the McDonald's of coffee.

Here's an excerpt from the excellent Dan Neil article:

What's fascinating to me about all this is the arc of coffee in America. A decade ago, the Starbucks audience was primarily affluent, college-educated progressives, a self-selected clientele of so-called latte liberals. Starbucks imported the notion of cafe society into the United States. It was the promised "third place" between home and work, where one could relax, read, talk and delectify a good cuppa in peace. Starbucks was social without the media.

But soon, in a mysterious alchemy between status and stimulants, Starbucks became prestige coffee, an aspirational beverage. The company, attempting to keep up with the money flooding in, standardized its retail environments, replaced its La Marzocco machines with automatic espresso machines, started to sell breakfast and lunch, and began hawking truckloads of branded merchandise and music.

By February 2007, Starbucks had well and truly sold out. In a notorious memo, Chairman Howard Schultz admitted the company had sacrificed the "romance and theater" of the coffee-shop experience to efficiency and profit. The sites, Schultz lamented, "no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighborhood store."

Starbucks failed, in other words, when it became the McDonald's of coffee. It seems only fair, perhaps inevitable, that Mickey D's fall on its big red nose attempting to be the Starbucks of fast-food.

I couldn't help but think there is a cautionary tale here for Epic: It would be silly for us to sacrifice our beautiful uniqueness and boutiqueness of a community chasing better business acumen or coveting the next edgy "movement," losing our soul and becoming indistinguishable from a thousand other churches in the process. That wouldn't be interesting and neither would we.