Stealth Starbucks

A Starbucks coffee shop in disguise.

“In the continued flailings of the Starbucks chain, here’s a new one: thestealth Starbucks store,” Steve Johnson wrote for The Chicago Tribune:

A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

Two other stores in Starbucks’ native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name to make it sound more like a neighborhood hangout, less like Big Coffee, a Starbucks official told The Seattle Times on Thursday.

Tim Pfeiffer, the senior vice president of global design at Starbucks told The Seattle Times that the new stores were intended to have “a community personality.” According to The Times, 15th Avenue Coffee and Teaproducts will carry their own brand logo, rather than that of Starbucks:

In the spirit of a traditional coffeehouse, it will serve wine and beer, host live music and poetry readings and sell espresso from a manual machine rather than the automated type found in most Starbucks stores.

Dan Ollis, owner of Victrola Coffee Roasters – one of two Seattle coffee houses to which Starbucks employees reportedly made repeated “research” trips – told The Chicago Tribune: “The Goliath is coming at me under a new name.”

Marc Gunther at the Huffington Post observed:

You can imagine where this un-branding campaign could lead. A little neighborhood burger place run by McDonald’s? A little neighborhood hardware store owned by Home Depot? A little neighborhood five-and-dime operated by Wal-Mart?