Starbucks Macro-Environmental Analysis

Starbucks Macro-Environmental Analysis

Starbucks is very well positioned to take advantage of sustained income due to a variety of strategic macro-environmental variables affecting its performance. Starbucks stage is the entire world, therefore must take into consideration the local countries current technological, economic, cultural, and political/legal environment, but also the interplay between countries as well. Starbucks cannot simply adapt completely policies and marketing to suit a single country, because it has a consistent brand it must focus on maintaining throughout the world. With that being said, I will go into a brief analysis of the macro-environmental factors affecting Starbucks in its largest market, North America.

The technological environment is changing quickly in America, and is affecting coffee-houses mainly increasing demand for Wi-Fi internet access. Starbucks has done a good job of supplying internet access throughout most of its stores, although as an increasing amount of competitors begin offering free internet access, Starbucks may have to consider lowering, or ditching the high prices of its own internet access.

The political/legal environment affects Starbucks very little within America, although can be much more disruptive when concerning the coffee beans that Starbucks imports from countries imports from around the world. Starbucks must worry about increases taxes and tariffs from many of the world's most volatile countries throughout South America and Africa. Because of the nature of politics, it may be very hard to predict how reliable their sources of beans are, so Starbucks must continually have alternatives for importing coffee to supply its demand in North America.

The economic environment has a big effect on sales in Starbucks, as people shop more the more money that is available. Starbucks must maintain a flexible workforce, and an efficient hiring system so that it may expand when the economy is doing good, and quickly shed workers when the economy is experiencing a downturn.

The social/cultural environment affects the business of Starbucks because Starbucks has set itself up as not only a place to drink coffee, but as a cultural institution in America. Therefore changes in the societal preferences of people, and changes in peoples activities will have huge affects on peoples tendencies to go to a Starbucks. The rise and fall of trends such as frozen yoghurt, soda fountains, or trendy donut shops will directly increase or decrease the amount of business coffee-shops such as Starbucks receive. Starbucks therefore must adapt to these trends as suitable, and offer