"These now, are the walls we must tear down"

I've never been so proud to be a member of the human family as I was today when I listened to citizen Barack Obama deliver his vision for a new world in Berlin -

zjm

A Fresh Vision for the World: Citizen Obama Speaks to over 200,000 in Berlin

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.

"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand."

Obama in Jordan

Starbucks tanking; walk an extra block

by Lisa Van Dusen

NEW YORK CITY - Not only am I not an economist, I've never even been a business reporter, not withstanding many long, deep-vein-thrombosis-inducing hours covering International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization meetings.

But I am a Starbucks junkie, which has gotta count for something in the world of coffee punditry.

The recent announcement of 600 closures by the loved and hated Seattle-based java-monger has been lumped in with the death of the Chrysler minivan, the Fannie and Freddie crisis and all the other signs of economic apocalypse that have made "It's the f---ing economy, stupid" this U.S. election's revamped slogan.

But Starbucks was headed for trouble long before it started madly whipping pushpins out of its worldwide coffee domination map.

Anyone who's walked into a Starbucks in the past couple of years and felt -- instead of reassuring familiarity and anticipation at the thought of the same skinny venti half-caf caramel macchiato or whatever your poison is -- an inner groan at the Groundhog Day predictability of it all, knows there was a flaw in the business plan.

Starbucks, like Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and other U.S. store chains that specialize in drawing customers who first go to Starbucks to get a $5 coffee to nurse while trolling their wares, all sell a certain lifestyle.

They deal in a cultural cachet based on the aspirational appeal of fitting a certain profile: Highly educated, smart, hip, politically aware, esthetically refined, internationalist, sensualist, sophisticated . . . a mix of attributes absolutely un-achievable for any human with a full-time job.

That's why it's aspirational.

Inherent in that appeal were both a sense of exclusivity and a pretence to cool, two things that have, by definition, a limited shelf-life in a world where there's always the next find and, it seems, all trends are global.

The idea that people spend money to enhance their social standing has been around at least since Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" a century ago and is still the operating premise behind any business plan based on cool and exclusivity.

But unless it includes a cyclical Madonna-like reinvention, the plan has to foresee its own demise.

Veblen also came up with the scarcity theory of value, a.k.a. the Tickle Me Elmo effect, or the economics version of the old why-buy-the-cow-if-you-can-get-the-milk-for-free bugaboo about premarital sex: The less available something is, the greater its value.

Starbucks had a problem long before the U.S. economy started tanking because it was caught at the crossroads of squandered exclusivity based on overexpansion and expired cool based on the lack of a plan B when the concept got stale.

In February, 2007, CEO Howard Schultz admitted as much in a leaked memo, regretting the "watering down of the Starbucks experience" and "commoditization of our brand," saying one of the results was "stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighbourhood store."

Schultz telegraphed the current closings by more than a year.

In a world in which the focus of those same customers is increasingly on authenticity as a commodity and on local rather than global, it might be hard for Starbucks to reinvent itself in the image of the very neighbourhood stores it replaced.

Having said that, I walked out of my hotel yesterday morning to my old Starbucks on Columbus Avenue and was pretty peeved when it was closed for renovations.

It was a five-block walk to the next one.