Starbucks in China: The Good, The Bad, and the Sugarfree

A Starbucks in Chengdu, China

While Starbucks is sometimes seen as a monolithic coffeeslinger to the upwardly mobile masses, the coffee chain’s branches abroad don’t entirely conjure up home. Though it’s mostly a deliciously familiar task of navigating between tall, grande, and venti, be it NYC or Shanghai, I felt alienated at times without my standby sugarfree option and decent English magazines. (I wrote about how much I adored Starbucks in my post about being culture shocked.)

Starbucks is transliterated/translated as 星巴克 (xing ba ke, literally star + transliteration of “bucks”). They’ve  done an admirable and interestingly incomplete job of localizing its stores.

Overall, I will say that the similarities far outweigh the differences. Starbucks is not meant to be a Chinese experience so much as a Western one, including the quirky name scheme for different sizes, which is preserved. Its foreignness, that is to say, is a desirable quality. But the changes reveal interesting cultural differences in how – or which – people drink this stuff.

Some background: the Chinese coffee market is rapidly growing – one industry report pegs growth in the double digits – and there’s plenty of room for expansion. Per capita consumption hasn’t reached .1kg yet, while Japan, another traditionally tea-drinking nation, gulps down 3.3kg per capita. Starbucks first moved into the Chinese market in 1999 with its first store in the China World Trade Center in Beijing and has been expanding rapidly ever since.

Another Starbucks in Chengdu.

Coffee has really taken off in urban areas, where you can see expats and Chinese alike sucking down giant Fraps during business meetings. Here, it’s more a fact of daily life, but if you talk to the laobaixing (normal people), particularly the older generation and those not as well off, they’ll cringe at the idea of drinking coffee.
On foldout Beijing map distributed by the company, it not only maps every Starbucks locale (66 in total at the time of printing, 68 now), but also touts the chain as a blend of local and American culture. While the menu has a familiar slate of iced coffee, macchiatos, and lattes, I noticed major differences in not only drinks, but also the way they’re ordered.

Here’s a quick and dirty rundown of what you can expect.

What’s different.

1) There’s no sugarfree option.
Actually, the whole concept of “sugarfree” is pretty alien in China. Your only real option for sugarless drinks is diet Coke, and even then, that’s not guaranteed in most restaurants. So when you order your caramel frappucino, rest assured it comes with nothing but real sweetness. If you ask baristas about Splenda, they may look at you blankly (“Fake sugar! In yellow packets!” I tried to explain) but it is offered as a nod to those kooky Western traditions.

2) There’s less customization.
American Starbucks views a coffee drink as a make-your-own affair. The menu is not so much a menu, but a starting point for a perfectly customized, no whip, sugar free, extra shot concoction. Chinese people, however, tend to order coffee as it is labeled on the menu without lots of special requests – partly because most people aren’t that familiar with coffee in the first place. Some menus I’ve seen also have helpful, illustrated instructions on how to order a coffee, with steps like choosing a size and deciding whip or no whip.

3) Specialty flavors cater to local palates.
I tried a coffee with grass jelly concoction that would seem more in place at a bubble tea stop. Bits of black jelly shot up my straw, cool and slippery, as I marveled at the “glocalization” of a simple drink. The bill came out… a lot. Which brings me to my next point.

4) Prices are sky high.
The tall iced coffee, at 15 RMB (about 2.20 USD) is the drink closest to its US price. But since coffee is considered a luxury, lifestyle drink here, its pricing places it firmly out of the reach of many and even caused me to think twice about ordering anything but uh, a tall iced coffee. A simple vanilla latte is 30 RMB, about 4.40 USD, more than you would pay stateside. To put 30 RMB in context, a cheap entree in a Chinese restaurant in Shanghai would run about 15 RMB. A bowl of noodles is 5-6 RMB. Eat several meals or drink a latte? I would hate to choose.

5) There’s no extra charge for soy.
This is a land of soy!

6) People tend to sit and stay.
There’s a lot less takeout business (http://www.seattlepi.com/business/228728_sbuxchina16.html), and a lot more sipping, socializing, and meeting up. People stay for the experience, rather than just grabbing a pick-me-up and dashing.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: what hasn’t changed.

1) Baristas repeat the order in English.
One quirk, however, is “tall iced coffee” becomes “iced tall coffee.”

2) Similar snacks and food are offered.
There’s the same offering of biscotti and muffins, but wait: Starbucks-branded moon cakes! At insane prices!

Yep, that's 328 yuan, or $48 USD, for four decorative cakes. Or you could buy nearly 70 bowls of noodles for the same price. Or a five course meal at a very nice restaurant.

3) Tall iced coffee is pretty much the same thing – and price – on both continents.

It’s my standby cheap, low cal, caffeinated pick me up. When I was back on American soil, it was also the first thing I bought in the LA airport, waiting for my connecting flight. Some good things just never change.

4) Baristas are (bizarrely) friendly.
I have no proof that I didn’t just happen to have naturally friendly baristas. But if you’ve tasted service culture in China, you know that good, Chinese-style service tends towards deferential, not chatty. In fact, my cashier asking casually if I was late to work one morning as I dropped a bookbag on the counter threw me for a loop. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it in the US, but the day before, something similar had happened. Did they… train them to make small talk? I have to wonder.

5) There are plenty of competitors.
Just as Starbucks must contend with independent coffeehouses and chains like Coffee Beanery and Peet’s Coffee in the US, there’s even more visible competition in major cities like Shanghai where every other street sports rivals like SPR Coffee (http://www.sprcoffee.com/), Costa Coffee (http://www.costa.co.uk/), and the Coffee Bean (http://coffeebean.com/).

Happy caffeinating!