http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/arts/22domi.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=9e5ea45a7a4bd7a8&ex=1162353600
Mr. Schultz said one the most valuable assets in the Starbucks culture project was the chain’s wireless Web-access network. “What’s coming is an opportunity to leverage WiFi as a channel,” he said, “and that channel is going to have the ability to expose our customers digitally to unique content.” He added: “It’s not a stretch to think of Starbucks in a new way as a network. A new channel with 12,500 points of distribution,” with every point representing a Starbucks store around the world.
And that channel, no doubt, will be geared toward the European-coffee-drinking, CD-liner-notes-reading, singer-songwriter-loving Starbucks customers, who now not only relax at the same coffee shops but also go home and listen to the same jazz release while possibly reading the same reliably entertaining, even inspirational, book. At the Starbucks in Ardsley, prominently displayed on the wall is a poster of an elephant lumbering comfortably along in the burnt-sienna rays of the sun. Below the image is printed, in typewriterlike letters, a message from Starbucks that the company has made, through its good taste, increasingly tempting: “Move with the herd.”
