April Fool's Day 2025!
Yes, it’s April 1st. The main point of the Starbucks story that brought you here is not, I’m sorry to say, true. But lots of the background detail is factual. You’ll find quotations and links below.
My April Fool’s letters have been a tradition at Berkshire Publishing for 20 years. The first one was prescient, I realized last week when I read this story about AI-composed letters. I remember how we laughed when online-networking expert Barry Wellman fell for my joke about Google’s being able to compose letters and asked me for the test link.
The truly infamous of my April 1st stories was the simplest of all: I wrote it sitting on the floor at a library conference in Seattle, explaining that I was moving, and taking my company, to that lovely city. We called it the story that would never die. Last year’s story about MIT came close.
My own favorite is the one about the Friendship Wall because the names of the Chinese construction firms are so realistic and yet so hilarious, thanks to Tom Christensen’s input. A retrospective of our April Fool’s Day is here.
I admit that it’s become harder to find comic stories in this less than amusing world—my old jokes about US-China relations fall flat, and that story about the wall between Mexico and the US has darker undertone today—but third places are still a cheering thought. Let’s go out and find them. Happy April 1st!
“This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred & sixty-four.” – Mark Twain
Olive oil in Starbucks coffee
Oleato™ began in Sicily when Starbucks founder Howard Schultz was introduced to the daily Mediterranean custom of having a spoonful of olive oil. As he sipped his morning coffee, he was inspired to try the two together. There he unlocked the unexpected: coffee enhanced with lush, velvety flavor that lingers beautifully on the palate.
Infused with award-winning Partanna® extra virgin olive oil, Oleato is more than a drink. It is a revelation in coffee, one that is luxurious and next-level. Once an idea, today a drinking experience available nationwide.
The sophisticated flavor of Oleato beverages reawakens the senses with a new and luxurious experience that must be tasted to be believed.
Latest “third place try
Starbucks, under new CEO Brian Niccol, is making significant changes to win back customers who abandoned the chain in recent years.
Starbucks is reinstating the practice of employees writing customers' names on cups using black Sharpie markers. Also, the self-service condiment bars that were removed during the pandemic will return.
The olive oil-infused line, Oleato, that the company heavily marketed, will be eliminated.
• More than 30% of Starbucks transactions are now mobile
• Over 60% of Starbucks' business comes from cold drinks
As Starbucks' holiday menu launches tomorrow, it will be interesting to see what other changes are in store to revitalize the brand and recapture customer loyalty. As a less loyal customer, I'm interested in these changes and expect Starbucks' sales to grow.
Read the Wall Street Journal article (free).
New York Times reports that “Starbucks is “reclaiming the ‘third place’”
That’s what its chief executive, Brian Niccol, proclaimed in an October earnings call, after the coffee giant suffered a slide in sales and store traffic.
He was echoing a statement he had made when he started the job in September — that he wanted to re-establish Starbucks as “a gathering space” where people want “to linger” — a vibe that some say has been lost as drive-through and mobile pickup orders have come to outnumber longer visits.
While Starbucks has never been a third place, at least this article (free) credits Ray Oldenburg and links to our UNESCO article.
From Starbucked by Taylor Clark (2007)
The perfect catchphrase for the coffeehouse's vital social function happened to be languishing in disuse, just waiting for someone to seize on it. When Harry Roberts found himself struggling to put the communal appeal of Starbucks into words, he shared his trouble with his wife, who soon stumbled across the solution in a bookstore: an out- of-print book called The Great Good Place, by a sociology professor named Ray Oldenburg. In his book, Oldenburg describes America's need for the neutral, safe, public gathering spots that had gradually disappeared; he calls this nexus the "third place," with home and work being places one and two. His words were eerily prescient — he even pointed out that third places generally revolve around beverages, like with teahouses and pubs. As Schultz might have said, the synergy was too good to be true. The company now had its philanthropic rallying cry: it wasn't a coffee company, but a third place bringing people to- gether through the social glue of coffee.
And who could disagree? Well, Ray Oldenburg, for one. Now retired, Oldenburg is grateful for the renewed attention that Starbucks brought to his third-place idea, but he remains displeased that the company co-opted his concept. "It was a little tacky of them not to consult me," he told me, [footnote: *Adding to the injury, Schultz has lately taken credit for the third-place concept himself, telling CNBC's American Made program in 2006, "l coined this phrase over the last ten, fifteen years about Starbucks being this third place between home and work."]
Oldenburg's idea of a third place was actually of a calmer, mom-and-pop establishment without Starbucks's high volume and fast turnover. He appreciates the headway against the civically disengaged suburbs, however. When I asked him what inspired the third-place idea, he replied, "Oh hell, I bought a house in a subdivision. That's what did it. Jesus! Nobody knows each other! I mean, it's like forming community is against the law in the suburbs." Still, when Oldenburg got a call recently from an advertising firm representing Starbucks and the caller asked if he would be willing to endorse the company, he declined. But despite Oldenburg's disapproval, Starbucks soon spread the third place across America, and neither the company nor the country would be the same again. As Howard Behar put it, "When it became the third place, the dynamics changed completely."
Don’t miss Everything But the Coffee
Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks by Bryan Simon
I also referred to “Coffeehouses And The Art Of Social Engagement: An Analysis Of Portland Coffeehouses.” May 2017 Geographical Review 108(3). This was sent to me by real-life phenomenologist, David Seamon, whose work you’ll read about in The Great Good Place II.
Finally, a great article about the (real) Starbucks logo by Mark Wilson at Fast Company: The Starbucks Logo Has A Secret You’ve Never Noticed. Mark interviewed me for “The Death of a Place to Sit,” about the removal of chairs from Starbucks and other chains.