Starbucks is FALLING apart (this is sad)

Starbucks is falling apart and nobody's talking about it.
Six consecutive quarters of declining sales. Fistfights over $30 bear cups. Protein lattes that turn into cement. A CEO making $96 million while baristas make $14,000. And the "third place" they built their entire brand on? Dead.
In this video, we break down how America's favorite coffee company lost its way - from manufactured scarcity marketing to olive oil coffee disasters to stores that now feel like hospital waiting rooms.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - The Bear Cup Chaos
0:45 - Manufactured Scarcity
3:30 - When The Drinks Stopped Working
6:00 - Death of the Third Place
9:00 - Competition Eating Them Alive
11:30 - The $96 Million CEO
13:00 - What Happens Next

SOURCES
Starbucks Q1-Q4 FY2024 Earnings Reports
CBC News - Bearista Cup Coverage
Harvard Business Review - "How Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand"
National Labor Relations Board Filings
CNN Business - Oleato Discontinuation

This is the story of how Starbucks, once viewed as the most dependable coffee stop in America, quietly began to fall apart. The company is now struggling through declining sales, product launches that turned into public messes, store closures across the country, worker strikes that grew louder each year, and controversies that kept piling up. The viral frenzy surrounding the limited-edition bear cup made all of these issues much more visible, because it showed how far the brand had drifted from what people once loved about it. Today, we’re breaking down how Starbucks lost its direction, and the Bearista cup release is the perfect window into the larger problems happening behind the scenes.

Starbucks introduced the Bearista cup on November 6th, 2024. It was a glass mug shaped like a small bear wearing a green beanie lid, priced at $29.95, and customers reacted almost immediately. Lines formed outside stores well before sunrise, and many people arrived long before opening just to make sure they could grab one. What they found instead were shelves that never had stock in the first place, because some stores only received two cups, while others received only one. People who came at 4 AM said that the cups were gone by the time the doors opened, and some customers never even saw one displayed.
The tension escalated in Houston when deputies from the Harris County Constable’s office were sent to a Starbucks around 5 AM to break up fights and remove people refusing to leave the store. Their public statement even joked that deputies were restoring peace before anyone spilled a latte or lost a teddy bear, which made the situation sound almost humorous, even though the crowd genuinely needed police to calm things down.
Starbucks apologized and claimed they didn’t expect demand to reach that level, yet earlier releases had followed the exact same pattern. January 2024 saw chaos over the pink Stanley cup, and November 2023 brought another wave of frenzy over the red Stanley. Before that came the peachy pink Quencher, which created its own round of viral videos and overnight lines. The formula stayed the same every time: limited stock, overnight camp-outs, frantic grabbing, and huge resale prices.
A professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute pointed out that brands use limited-edition drops because they create urgency, and that’s exactly what Starbucks kept leaning on. What nobody expected was how heavily Starbucks began depending on these moments, which suggested the brand understood that its usual excitement had faded. Instead of generating interest through great drinks or warm store experiences, Starbucks relied on orchestrated scarcity to spark attention. It was a sign that something deeper was slipping.


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