The Starbucks Experience

This is the next book that I would like to review. It is with regard to the company Starbucks.

It looks at our it managed to change people conception about coffee from a 40 cent to a dollar plus drink to become something that people would be willing to pay 5 dollars for a product which in essence is still coffee. When it first started off as a single shop, no one would have expected it to grow till today size.

The author of the book is Joseph A. Mchelli.

The book starts of with the introduction where it looks briefly into the history of Starbucks. It's first outlet was located in Seattle. The founder who was Howard Schulz had an idea. He wondered how would people react if instead of paying the usual 50 cent take away coffee, if he was to provide premium coffee in an European-style coffee shop, would the consumer be willing to pay a premium. On hind sight, it was a brilliant idea as there was a demand for such type of places and with the high level of quality service provided by Starbucks staff, the business continued to grow continuously.

In summary, the Starbucks experience can be experience at 2 distinct levels. The first level is that it has a unique corporate culture where the leaders create a unique culture for the employees to take up responsibility for their action, to give them the room to be entrepreneurship and most important to stress that quality and service is of the utmost importance. This is especially true for anyone in the customer service related industry.
The second level is that these values are been passed down to all the partners as they are the direct contact with the customer in the shops.

In the opinion of the writer, there are 5 main key concepts which are been ever present and could explain for their phenomenon success. the 5 concepts are:

1. Make it your own
2. Everything matters
3. Surprise and delight
4. Embrace resistance
5. Leave your mark

They look very simple but not simplistic. They are also very result orientated goals and can be very powerful when applied. A good example will be Starbucks.

In the book, each chapter will be specifying one of the 5 key concepts. The book is written in a very easy to read style and there are a lot of anecdotes in each chapter which relates to real life situation. It also tries to explain each concept in a very non-technical way and try to bring about the point by sing examples.

Overall, it is a well written book and will be suitable for anyone who wants to find out more about Starbucks or for anyone who is interested in finding out ways to improve their business through better customer service relation.