Miscellaneous

Starbucks, Commercial Law and the Perfect Coffee Pledge

By Bill Gratsch

I am halfway through, and thoroughly enjoying, a book covering the origins and subsequent growth of Starbucks and the United States love affair with coffee drinks.   Entitled Starbucked, the book is well written and recommended for aficionados of coffee and entrepreneurship alike.

With the above in mind, a post at a recently started blawg, Commercial Law, An update on the coffee, caught my eye this morning.

The post, written by Law Professor Jennifer Martin, mentions a recent legal setback for Starbucks in California, as well as its continued recognition among the top of Fortune's Best Companies to Work For list.  The post continues with the following commentary regarding Starbucks' perfect coffee pledge:

The problem with the perfect coffee pledge to me, though, still remains. Starbucks has set consumer expectations high, but their ability to convert on their pledge of quality coffee rests with the employees in the stores. That is where the tension between being a great place to work and discontent over the tipping policy may affect whether the baristas ultimately ?make it right.?

All of this serves as a reminder that companies which make express warranties regarding the quality of their products may be heavily dependent on their employees to really come through. This would seem to be especially true where the sale involves a mixed goods and services transaction. As to Starbucks, the dependence and ultimate fulfillment of warranty conditions (if the perfect coffee pledge is more than puffery) will require employee dedication to ensure quality coffees.

In the comments following the post, Meredith Miller noted that:

It is so interesting to me that you describe Starbucks as providing both a good and a service. I gave a contracts exam recently that involved an entity based upon Starbucks (named Starlucks). I was surprised how many students identified the transaction as mixed - where, I had thought of it only as a sale of a cup of coffee and, thus, simply a sale of a good. But, to the extent the entity in the fact pattern was based on Starbucks, I had to give the students credit for this analyis. Above all else, the company has been successful in marketing itself as providing more than just a cup of coffee, but the preparation (to supposed perfection) of that cup of coffee. (By the way, the other marketing triumph is calling a small coffee a "tall" -- sounds like so much more...) But, my point is that, before the infestation of Starbucks, I think we all would have agreed (to paraphrase Freud slightly): a cup of coffee was just a cup of coffee.

To which Professor Martin responded and etcetera. 

Funny how some mornings you pour yourself a cup of coffee and dive in the blawgosphere...only to realize thirty minutes later you have just worked through a legal fact set and your coffee has gone cold.

Dive in yourself: An update on the coffee, Starbucks' "perfect" coffee pledge

Good stuff. 

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).