starbucks

T-Mobile USA is suing Starbucks, accusing the coffee behemoth of a breach of contract by allowing AT&T to provide customers with free Wi-Fi access in its cafes.

In a complaint filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, T-Mobile says Starbucks "secretly" developed a plan with AT&T to provide Wi-Fi at its cafes, despite an exclusive partnership with T-Mobile. T-Mobile, which is seeking unspecified damages, alleges the companies broke an agreement over how Starbucks should transition the service from T-Mobile to AT&T, according to Reuters.

T-Mobile said that, under the … Read more

AT&T's free Wi-Fi access for Starbucks coffee shops is finally here.

Starting Tuesday, Starbucks coffee shops across the country are offering two hours of free Wi-Fi Internet service through AT&T. In order to get the free service, customers must buy a Starbucks Reward Card with a minimum of $5 credit on it. Customers also must sign up for the free Wi-Fi online at Starbucks.com. To keep the card active, customers must also use their Starbucks Card at least once a month.

The free service is only for two hours and must be used in … Read more

After describing a particularly exciting consulting opportunity, a friend called me "lucky." That got me thinking: Is he right? Is luck a component in business success, or is it all about knowledge and experience. And if luck does play a role, how important is it? Can it be influenced, or is that taboo by definition?

To answer those questions I first did a little research. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines luck as "a: a force that brings good fortune or adversity, or b: the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual."

Gee, "luck" sounds a lot like "competition" to me.… Read more

Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.

My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.

It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.

It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before … Read more

Starbucks pioneered the notion that coffee should be $3 a cup, and its been a great business model. However, the company has been late to the party on 2 areas: lower cost options and better tasting coffee, the confluence of which has caused the stock price to sag as the repeat visitors dipped.

Now the company is now trying crowdsourcing as its way to the future. (Note to self: get Starbucks to put my blog excerpts on its coffee cups)

The new MyStarbucksIdea site reminds me of Dell's Ideastorm, which was in part the impetus for Dell to start offering laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. … Read more

You know social networking has jumped the shark when Starbucks gets into the act.

Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Idea, an electronic suggestion box where people can offer up their best ideas for making the already ubiquitous coffee retailer even more successful.

You could say the company is as aggressive with its Internet campaigns as it is with its prices. There is Wi-Fi in the stores, they let you log onto iTunes to see what song is playing in the store and download it, let you use text messaging to find the nearest store, and they gave away free digital … Read more

Yesterday's New York Times story about Starbucks losing credibility among music fans has attracted a lot of commentary. The gist of the story: Starbucks went too mainstream by stocking artists like Alicia Keys and James Blunt, so its customers figure they might as well shop at Wal-Mart, which stocks the same CDs at lower prices. The record industry, which once looked to Starbucks as a potential savior, is having second thoughts.

Why is anybody surprised? Look at their history in the coffee business. Espresso used to be a niche product that was hard to produce properly and varied widely … Read more

Monday's announcement that Starbucks will end its Wi-Fi partnership with T-Mobile had some HotSpot subscribers worried. After all, Starbucks locations are a significant source of T-Mobile HotSpots. One of the key attractions of T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home service is the ubiquity of such HotSpots (HotSpot @Home is a service that lets T-Mobile subscribers make unlimited phone calls via Wi-Fi).

However, according to a T-Mobile news release, existing HotSpot customers will not be impacted by the switch for at least another five years. AT&T Wi-Fi operations have yet to begin, and even after the transition, customers can take … Read more