COFFEE chain czar Howard Shultz's sacking of his chief executive came hours after McDonald's announced its intention to sell high-grade espresso drinks in 14,000 of its outlets.
Reporting the Monday sacking of Mr Jim Donald yesterday, the Independent said that it had been a bad year for the Seattle-based coffee giant, with the number of store transactions down in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 for the first time in the company's history.
The share price is also taking a pounding, down almost 50 per cent in value over the past 12 months.
"The competitive threat from the world's largest burger merchant was merely the last straw," it commented.
Mr Schultz has decided to resume the top job himself - after a break of almost eight years.
The Independent said that problem, as company insiders now freely acknowledge, is that Starbucks has become altogether too much like McDonald's - over-automated, ubiquitous and impersonal - while still charging premium prices for its skinny decaf lattes and frappuccinos.
That is not good for the company's image, and it is not good for business.
"Since Mr Schultz is an unabashed romantic, who has always talked about selling a concept and a way of being as much as a cup of coffee, he has another way of stating the problem: Starbucks, in his words, has lost its soul," the report said.
"When you succeed at this level for so long... you get a little soft," he told reporters this week.
"We have to get back to what made this company great, and that is to have the courage and curiosity and the commitment to do things that have not been done before."
Starbucks has enjoyed more than 15 years of dizzying expansion.
Already in the late 1990s, American popular culture was poking fun at the place. An episode of The Simpsons imagined an entire shopping mall in which every outlet was a Starbucks.
Such scenarios no longer seem quite so ridiculous. In Seattle's Pike Place Market, site of the original Starbucks bean retail store, one building features three separate Starbucks outlets.
The chain, or its coffee, is in airports, planes, shopping malls, hotel lobbies and conference centres.
Mr Donald focused heavily on expansion. Mr Schultz now says he plans to focus more on improving the existing branches, especially in the US, while ramping up Starbucks' foray abroad, especially in China.
Mr Shultz is particularly concerned about the switch to automated espresso machines and pre-bagged coffee beans, which he said gave customers no clue that the company actually roasts its own beans.
The fact that customers no longer saw employees handle the beans and grind them before their eyes robbed them of both a key visual and aromatic pleasure and depersonalised what he called the "intimate experience with the baristas". The stores, he concluded, "no longer have the soul of the past".
The just-another-cup-of-coffee concept, meanwhile, is ripe for competition from the fast-food chains, not least because, in the US, they charge 60 US cents (85 Singapore cents) to 80 US cents less per cup.
Mr Shultz has to deliver - not just coffee, but, in his words, that "superior experience".
