Anthropological Study Starbucks

As a part of the Macklin Business Institute, the business program at Montgomery College, we run a café located inside the Rockville campus where we have been serving Starbucks products for several years. Recently, the minimum wage has been increased for employees and the abrupt change forced the business program to discuss different ways to deal with the inevitable increase in salary expense in order to least impact in profits. I was surprised to discover that although the operations team brought up a lot of hard numbers, nobody seem to bring up any information regarding the atypical environment surrounding the café, being located inside a community college, or our distinct customer base that is almost exclusively composed of students and …show more content…
With this in mind, I presented the idea of making an anthropological study to both the director of the program and the manager at the café and they both decided it was agreeable as long as it did not impaired my performance as an employee or created any discomfort to customers. From the beginning, I decided to gather information from customers and employees by informal methods because, I reasoned, the act of purchasing coffee, in general, is performed in a casual manner and any attempt to perform a formal interview would yield biased or skewed data. This is due to the fact that voluntary samples will create voluntary response bias, that is to say that only customers and employees with strong opinions about our business would be willing to give up their time for an interview. On the other hand, to gather information about the history of the café I set out to perform formal interviews with two sophomore members that are part of the operations team. Finally, as a contrast I decided to study the past and the present of Starbucks’ stores and the Starbucks company as a …show more content…
Under normal circumstances, one can hardly notice all the marketing techniques and deliberate actions that are taken that ultimately lead to Starbucks being so successful. I searched briefly on the web about some of the observations in order to find if they were intentional and surprisingly almost everything about Starbucks is carefully selected with a purpose. Specifically, Baristas are actually required to smile on their job description in order to ensure friendliness. Next, Starbucks spends more money on healthcare than it does on coffee beans. Further, they created their characteristic cup sizes (tall, grande, venti and trenta) in order to create their own coffee culture. Even more, the round tables are designed to make solo coffee drinkers feel less lonely and encourage people to hang out even when unaccompanied (BusinessInsider.com). Granted, these were only some of the many tactics that were being thrown around the web so I decided to investigate more