Why I don’t drink coffee at Starbucks

Starbucks is a common thing in the United States and in numerous countries, but not in Vietnam. This American corporation just opened the first store in my hometown about…two years ago, in 2013. People said it was too late, I think it is still too soon to be dominated.

The first Starbucks in Ho Chi Minh city

Let me describe Vietnam in terms of drinking coffee for you. You might notice that we are the second-largest coffee-producing country in the world, right behind Brazil. It is understandable that we have a huge culture of drinking coffee. I started my first cup of coffee when I was 10 years old, I guessed. It was because I thought drinking coffee was something cool and mature. I had had a prejudice about drinking coffee like, “men who drink pure black coffee are manly”, for a long time (because my dad drinks it, I think). We can drink coffee almost every day (my mom does, she needs a cup of coffee every morning), everywhere. There is a corner in the center of Ho Chi Minh where everybody comes to sit down on the ground and to have a cup of to-go coffee. This coffee costs about 15.000VND (ignore the zeros, it is about 75cents). We have our own home-grown cafes called Trung Nguyen Coffee (which opened a store in Japan) and Highlands Coffee. The coffee here is more expensive, about 40.000~70.000VND ($2~$3.5). They have good coffee, nice staff, but they do not provide one thing: the curiosity.

Then I got access to the Internet. I heard about Starbucks. We did not have it in Vietnam, so I was curious about that. Like other young Vietnamese, I thought Starbucks was something fancy and trendy. I got my first order of Starbucks in Bangkok, Thailand. I bought my first Starbucks mug in Singapore. I meant I tried to reach to that, one way or another. Now, when I live in San Francisco, I come to Starbucks to buy Chai Tea Latte to keep me warm and to work on my papers (or to use their restrooms when I am in a road trip somewhere). My Starbucks mug is used for my flowers. Since I lived in the states, I just realized how bad Starbucks coffee is, comparing to Vietnamese coffee. The dominance of Starbucks is explained by their branding strategies, not by their products.

I am a fan of Starbucks, yes, for their marketing work, not for their products. I am not a coffee person, but I love Vietnamese coffee, I love the true smell of well crafted, freshly roasted coffee and I always fall for the coffee making process. Now my curiosity for Starbucks is already answered, I hope other young people in my hometown can get the same answer with mine when they come to Starbucks in Vietnam. They don’t serve you coffee, they serve you an experience and a service. We are friendly enough to welcome any foreign corporations, but we are also smart enough to preserve our culture.

This following video can present perfectly the right recipe for a cup of Vietnamese Coffee if you are still curious:

I remember I have had this following conversation million times:

My friend: What? You didn’t have Starbucks in Vietnam before?Me: Yea, we have our street-coffee

or:

My friend: What? You didn’t have McDonald’s before? Me: Yea, we have something called Banh Mi

I used to be so proud to answer my friends’ questions like that.