The success of Starbucks cafés has been good for coffee distributors all over the United States. Why? Because Starbucks has given coffee a new cachet. All coffee. Not just the product sold by Starbucks (which represents only a minute fraction of the coffee drunk in the country) but also the 80% sold in supermarkets—and all the rest.
A version of this article appeared in the March–April 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review.
