Name: Why Americans are OBSESSED with Starbucks
Uploaded: 2024-04-25T03:25:16.000Z
Duration: 18 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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For millions of people, their daily stop at Starbucks is a routine they don't even question.

They've become the biggest coffee chain in the world through incredibly clever marketing, devious design, and an uncanny ability to make people spend their money.

This is how Starbucks brainwashed a generation.

A huge thank you to Ground News for sponsoring today's video.

Now if you've been a loyal subscriber here on the channel for a while, you might know that we made a video about Starbucks and how they revolutionized the coffee industry.

Well, this is sort of a part two to that original one.

In that video, we talked about how they spearheaded the whole fair trade idea and then completely abandoned it, how they pioneered the coffee shop as a third place to hang out, and how they made specialty coffee a mainstream phenomenon for Americans, anyways.

Now those three things alone would have made them an icon within the coffee world.

But the thing is, Starbucks is not just a brand of coffee.

The reason why we're making this video right now is because at the time of writing this script, they've lost $11 billion in revenue as well as faced boycotts due to their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict and union busting.

But this isn't the first time that this company has faced boycotts or social backlash.

Over the years, they have received hate from the left and the right alike.

Starbucks has proven to be a pretty sketchy, giant corporation.

They've been caught using child labor in 2020, and then again two years later, and have been union busting for years.

But despite all of this chaos, all of this outrage at this company, they are still a global leader.

Well, it's because they've convinced millions of people that they aren't just a place to go and get coffee.

They are the only place to go and get coffee.

Starbucks is disturbingly good at making themselves a part of people's lives.

Over the years, they have created a connection with their core base that it seems like almost nothing can shake.

So we mentioned the controversy around Starbucks' stance on unions earlier, and we wanted to dig a little further into all of this.

Using Ground News, we found a bunch of information, like how Starbucks and Workers United finally announced a path forward to reach collective bargaining agreements.

Ground News is an app and a website that gathers news articles from all over the world with context so you truly understand what is going on.

We can access all 45 sources for this story, including the press release from Starbucks.

Most of them lean politically left or center, so this could have been missed or not on your radar if you consume mostly right-leaning news.

And if we look deeper, this is where it gets really interesting.

We can see that some articles are just sticking to the reporting on the start of these bargaining talks, while others give more context, like how the former CEO of Starbucks stepping down last year played a huge role in this breakthrough.

We keep working with Ground News because we truly resonate with their values.

Their one-of-a-kind platform perfectly syncs with our mission at Future Proof, which is to empower you all to make the informed decisions that you need to by sharpening your critical thinking skills.

And they're a proudly Canadian company just like us, so check them out at ground.news.com.

You can join for as little as $1 a month or use our link to get 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan, making infinite knowledge cheaper than your daily nitro cold brew.

See, people are so locked into the Starbucks routine that it's basically an addiction.

For many people, the local Starbucks coffee shop is their only local coffee shop.

This is because they are the biggest coffee chain in the world, with almost 40,000 stores in over 80 countries.

And this might seem like an arbitrary or obvious part of the story, but being able to get your fix on the way to work or when you go out of town cannot really be understated here.

I have known people who have booked all-inclusive resorts in another country because there was a Starbucks down the road.

These people would leave the resort where they get their free coffee, get in an Uber down the street, pay for a Starbucks, and then return to the resort.

Or they would get it delivered through Uber Eats.

And this is all a part of Starbucks' genius manipulation tactics.

They know that a lot of the reason why people choose to continue to come back to their shops and why they seek out their shops, even when they're on vacation, is because of their consistency.

No matter which of those 80-plus countries that you are in where Starbucks has stores, your experience there will be pretty much exactly the same.

And there is a very specific reason for this.

Almost half of Starbucks worldwide are licensed.

This means that the store is independently owned, but the store owners pay for the company's intellectual property, the branding, the logo, the drink recipes, the cups.

But in the case of Starbucks, they've included operational methods as a part of their intellectual property, all the way down to where the basket of plastic bottles is placed.

Whether you walk into their home location in Seattle or a cafe on the other side of the world, you know pretty much where everything is going to be and that it's going to be exactly the same, except for the prices.

In this context, not only is the physical space, the lighting, and the smell all the same, but your Triple Venti No Frap Frappuccino is going to taste the same, too.

And all of a sudden, the people in the resort kind of start to make sense, right?

Even if you're in a country where you don't speak the language or understand the culture or the directions back to the beach, you know exactly what to expect when you walk into that Starbucks.

But they take this one step further in the digital realm, too.

One of the more recent innovations that further entrenches people into the Starbucks ecosystem is the Starbucks Rewards app.

Of course, there are a lot of other chains and brands that have similar concepts for their stores, but none of them have done it quite as well or had the legendary success of Starbucks.

See, this app is designed to make the whole experience of going to Starbucks even more seamless.

Regular customers can use it to pre-order, pre-pay, and then skip half the line for a speedy pickup.

And the more that you use the app, the more free drinks you get.

But this app isn't just a nifty way to get a free drink on your birthday or skip a line or whatever.

For Starbucks, the app represents a whole new hold on the wealth that their dedicated following can offer.

Now, some of you might have seen an absolutely great video by fellow YouTube creator Pauly Matter.

In that video, he breaks down how Starbucks has turned their Starbucks Rewards program into its own proprietary banking system.

To summarize a part of his video, the loading of money onto the Rewards cards isn't just being used to pay for your drinks.

That money is being held by Starbucks and then used in other ways that most people are just completely unaware of.

And apparently, the Rewards program and the reloadable cards represents a significant amount of the chain's recent fiscal growth.

This is in part because the company is profiting off of those funds, even if the cards are never used.

That means the Starbucks cards are holding more in deposits than some American banks.

In fact, if Starbucks were a bank, it would rank among the top 10% of American financial institutions.

On top of using your money to make more money, the app also uses the analytics based on your purchase habits to inform their push notifications.

This includes personalized marketing about happy hour events and other perks that you might want to indulge in.

So you started using the app because you thought it was gonna be convenient, and then they ended up using your money to make more money, and then they started mining your data to get you to buy more, and this is probably not what you thought was gonna happen when you signed up to get that free birthday Frappuccino.

And that Frappuccino is the next part of this story.

See, I can tell you, because I am a person who lived in the times before Starbucks and after, that before Starbucks existed, nobody knew what the hell a Frappuccino was.

See, Starbucks sells coffee, but not because of passion or need, but because it's high in caffeine and therefore addictive.

But the real innovation behind Starbucks' beverages was the specialty drink culture that they created, which just added sugar to the equation, making them even more alluring.

Today, most people that order a drink at Starbucks aren't getting a coffee with cream in it.

The latte or cappuccino is the bare minimum, and most opt for a much more complicated flavored, seasonal, or color-coordinated beverage that look more like candy than coffee.

And this is just the stuff that's literally on their menu.

Apparently, there is a whole culture around secret menu drinks that I sadly had to learn about in the making of this video.

This has to be like the moment in which you realize just how lost in the sauce some people are with the whole Starbucks thing.

If you go on your phone right now and you look up Starbucks on TikTok, you're gonna find hundreds of secret menu drink videos.

And there are websites and other videos on other platforms that do the same thing.

These drinks were invented, I think, by Starbucks rider dyes with too much time on their hands, basically.

They basically take preexisting menu items and then add a whole bunch of customizations onto it that eventually turn it into a whole new drink.

And these things are expensive because each add-on is like 50 cents a pop.

I get why it happens, but I just wanna say two things on this before we move on.

Your barista hates you, the people behind you hate you, and you just don't need to do this, which brings me to my second point.

I personally just think it's such a bummer when people channel their artistic energy into something as trivial as Team Edward versus Team Jacob Frappuccinos, okay?

Maybe I'm being judgmental here, but sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if people spent more time expressing themselves in ways that didn't, you know, directly fund a massive company, you know?

Like, draw something, you know, cook something.

I don't know, learn how to do a handstand.

All right, but now we're gonna get into one of my favorite parts of this whole scenario, and that is the cup.