One-of-a-kind businesses still hold powerful attraction for consumers

Despite Starbucks’ message of high-end universalism, its global expansion did not go uncontested. When the World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999, protestors vandalised a Starbucks, accusing the company and other multinationals of polluting the environment and exploiting cheap labour in the developing world.

In 2003, Singapore’s Chua Chin Hon wrote, “I’m no anti-globalisation protestor,” but admitted a change of heart, triggered by a Starbucks opening in Beijing’s Forbidden City. He wrote about understanding “the rage against the global capitalist machinery’s relentless and oft-times, senseless drive to sell a few more cups of coffee, burgers, or T-shirts”.

Four years later, Rui Chenggang, an anchor for Chinese Central Television, demanded that Starbucks leave the nearly 600-year-old former royal residence. Accusing the company of tainting “China’s national culture”, he organised a boycott. Eventually Starbucks vacated the location, and a Chinese company took its place - selling lattes and cappuccinos in white cups with green logos.

Besides street and internet protests, consumers rebelled against sameness with their feet and pocketbooks. As the branded world of Starbucks, McDonald’s, The Gap and Disney, spread from North America to Europe to Asia, from cities to the suburbs, the value of traditional, neighborhood venues increased.

Some teenaged Singaporean Malays have responded to the spread of Starbucks and other Western culture markers in their country by embracing Islam, eating and drinking only Malay products including traditional coffee instead of lattes and Frappuccinos. Starbucks failed to establish footholds in Australia and Israel, places that already had well-established and locally controlled European style coffeehouses. Despite Starbucks’ presence in New Delhi and Mumbai, most Indian coffee drinkers prefer lattes from Indian-owned companies Coffee Day and Barista.

Starbucks takeover of street corners in Hong Kong triggered a kind of consumer dissent. One-of-a-kind, owner-operated coffeehouses - tiny and unadvertised - sprang up in second- or third-floor apartment living rooms all over the city. “When it comes to cafe culture,” wrote a Financial Times reporter, “above ground is the new underground”.

Perhaps the strongest resistance to Starbucks and its globalising impact took place close to the brand’s home base. Weary of the lack of choice posed by Starbucks, latte drinkers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, search for the local. Even as the economy tanked, they, like those Hong Kong hipsters, go out of their way and pay a little extra for one-of-a-kind items and local settings. Independent coffeehouses, like a farmers’ markets or bring-your-own-bottle restaurants, have new appeal in the US emerging economy of the small.

While Starbucks has struggled during the New Recession, closing 600 stores in the US and halting expansion abroad, sales at independents, according to industry sources, remain robust.

In 2009, Starbucks responded to the shift towards the small by redesigning and retrofitting several Seattle stores and, later, several London stores. The new cafes didn’t carry the Starbucks name or familiar green logo. One was named 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, another Roy Street Tea and Coffee. In other words, the company opened stealth Starbucks meant to look and sound like independent coffee shops.

The message? The global had generated so much demand for the local that a global chain needed to look local to survive globally, at least in some markets.

This marks a change in the appeal of the big versus the small. What’s constant in the age of globalisation is that the local and global co-exist, always in conversation and tension with each other. You can’t have one without the other.