Should we really wish for the failure of Starbucks in Rome?

For a few days in Rome there is a new bar. It is not just any bar and it is not in any location: it is the first Starbucks in Rome and is located in front of Montecitorio, in the heart of the city. Alec Ross, who dealt with innovation in the teams of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and for a year has chosen to live in Bologna where he teaches Economics, wrote a harsh post on Linkedin in which, in essence, he wishes Starbucks to fail in Italy.

Alec Ross says that bars in Italy have very often been owned by families for many generations and when we buy a coffee in a small bar “the profits remain in the Italian families and do not go to a multinational that is worth more than 100 billion”. In the United States, Ross always says, most of the small bars have disappeared due to the success of Starbucks and we should not follow that pattern. The argument is strong, also because the history of Starbucks itself is instead a textbook of innovation: from the first bar opened in Seattle in 1971 inspired by the name of a sailor from the novel Moby Dickuntil Howard Schultz’s trip to Milan and the discovery that nothing was like Italian coffee and hence the idea of ​​reproducing not only the aromas, but also the rhythm, the noises, the ritual. Since then Starbucks has conquered the world and only finally arrived in Italy.

When Starbucks opened in Milan in 2018, I wrote that the real thing to do, for Italian bars, was to rediscover the obsession with perfection. What we ask for every day is not just a coffee, it is a piece of our history, of our culture; it is an important moment of the day for millions of people, what we spend in a bar. And often that coffee is bad. There are bars that have understood this thing and I stop there with a sense of gratitude. Starbucks in Italy will fail, or rather will not have the overwhelming success it has had so far, only if we rediscover the taste of making a perfect coffee.