The Second Coming

A good many years ago, Starbucks arrived in Australia, opened hundreds of outlets and embarked upon a business plan that had worked quite unaltered in many other countries - expecting it to do likewise here. It featured second rate, faintly arrogant service and a basically insipid brew, drowned in a variety of diabetes inducing flavoured syrups and piled high with towers of wobbly whipped cream. Nobody that I spoke with at the time succeeded in identifying the product as actual coffee and we all stayed away in droves.

The Australian Starbucks  operation almost entirely closed down within eighteen months and unceremoniously retired in disorder.   

Hello hello. This hoarding was to be seen just outside Penrith Plaza today.  Evidently, they are about to have another go at the Australian market and it will be most interesting to find out if they have done their homework this time.

Thing is .... until after the second world war, Australians had virtually never HEARD of coffee. I can remember tasting "coffee" for the first time ever, back in about 1958. You see, the mass migration of Italians to Australia after 1945 had brought their eating habits with them such that the only thing that we Australians knew about coffee was what the Italians told us. Today, their concept of the beverage remains pretty much all we know .... and all we WANT to know. Italian café culture has taken hold in this country with a vengeance. Fool around with that at your peril, mate.   

The fellow with the shopping trolley wasn't originally scurrying past with quite the dispatch that is now evident. I added some speed blur because It pleased me to think that painful Starbucks  memories were causing him to vacate the precinct as quickly as possible.