What does 10 million Facebook fans mean?
Bryant Simon is a professor of American history and culture at Temple University and the author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.” The views expressed here are his own.
Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession.
As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.
Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the U.S. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.
McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.
The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the President is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.
Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).
from Shop Talk:
Starbucks workers will pay more for health insurance
Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz says the coffee chain now pays almost as much for employee health care as it does for coffee beans, so the company long-known for its generous health benefits will begin passing more of those costs to employees.
The news from Starbucks comes amid skyrocketing U.S. health-care costs that are forcing American companies large and small to hike employee health-care contributions, cut back on coverage, or eliminate it altogether.
U.S. health care spending consumes 16 percent of GDP, about $2.2 trillion a year, and is projected to rise to 25 percent of GDP by 2025. But while the U.S. spends more than any other country on health care, its residents aren't among the world's healthiest. Some 46 million Americans are uninsured.
President Barack Obama says a broad health care overhaul is critical to a U.S. economic recovery. Congress is not expected to pass any reforms until after Labor Day.
Remember all this next time you consider putting coin in the tip jar at Starbucks.
Starbucks and small business
The popularly-held belief that Starbucks kills mom-and-pop shops is a fallacy, says Temple University history professor Bryant Simon.
“In fact, Starbucks created the market for the small coffee shop,” says Bryant, whose new book “Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks” is due to be released in October.
Simon argues that 20 years ago you couldn’t find a “good” cup of coffee anywhere, until Starbucks came along and “created a desire and a taste for specialty coffee” that eventually gave birth to the corner specialty coffee shop.
In his column for TheBigMoney.com (Frappuccinos Work for Mom and Pop), Jonathan Weber argues that the closing of a Starbucks store in Missoula, Montana is no cause for celebration by small coffee houses. “It’s dangerous to assume that what’s bad for the chains is good for the mom-and-pops,” writes Weber, who maintains the loss of jobs from the Starbucks closure will hurt local businesses. “In this economy, a store closure is nothing to cheer about.”
A Slate article from 2007, titled “Don’t Fear Starbucks,” details the saga of a small Los Angeles-based coffee chain that discovered the intrusion of Starbucks was actually the best thing for its business.
Yet the perception of Starbucks driving out small businesses endures, as evidenced by a 2006 lawsuit against them by another Seattle-based coffee shop that claimed Starbucks “illegally maintains its monopoly by barring other coffeehouses from prime downtown high-rises in Seattle and Bellevue through exclusive leases with property owners.”
Belvi Coffee owner Penny Stafford, who launched the suit, claimed Starbucks ran her and other local shops out of business by “buying coffee sellers and flooding neighborhoods with new Starbucks stores that even cannibalized the sales of existing Starbucks shops.”
care about what their customers want? don’t you know the basis of economics?
profit.
A quiz about face book popularity. What’s the difference between Starbucks & Obama?
Answer: I can give up my Starbucks today & not think twice about it. With Obama I’ll have to wait until 2012 to dump this brand,and the aftertaste will last a lot longer !