Yesterday's Featured Article - Costa Coffee
Costa Coffee is a multinational coffee-house chain that operates over seven million coffee shops across 127 countries. Costa Coffee is famed for its motto, "A coffee for every mile," and rather less for its coffee. Costa Coffee's business strategy is to have a Costa Coffee shop "within view from anywhere in the UK."
The Costa Coffee website provides an insight into its history:
After reading an article about dwindling coffee shops in London, twins Mildred and Mortimer Costa seized the business opportunity to start a coffee brand and began importing raw coffee from Peru. Their practice was simple; order one tonne of coffee per month, extract the coffee seeds from the fruit by hand and then roast it in their mother’s kitchen oven. Less than two years after importing their first tonne of coffee, the stump-fingered Costa twins founded ’’Costa’s Roasted Seeds’’ in London in 1971. After three years of roasting, the Costas finally managed to accrue enough money to open their first coffee shop in central London. Costa Coffee™ as we know it was born. Its doors opened in August 1974 and was an immediate success. By 1983 it had expanded its franchise to 35 other locations across London’s suburbs and had established its now-famous branding.
To dominate the burgeoning UK coffee market, Costa Coffee developed an ambitious business strategy in 2009, setting itself near-impossible targets to meet by 2025. Its primary goal is to open as many stores as it can over the next 20 years. Like a viral outbreak, it has spread across the UK and infected many major business and retail outlets.
Costa Coffee can be purchased from inside petrol stations, public toilets, super-markets, WH Smiths, Homebase, public toilets,
high schools, national embassies, petrol stations, independent cobblers, and public toilets. Sub-units operate in a variety of different locations around the country including public toilets, international airports, bus stops, train stations, social khazis, and public toilets. Many of Costa’s smaller franchises rely on the Costa Insta-Machine, a self-service device found frequently in communal shitters.
(more...)
