The outrage cycle, Italian style

At the Milan Roastery, an espresso will cost 1.80 euros “sitting or standing,” Corriere della Sera noted, since in Italian coffee shops, the price changes depending on whether you have table service or gulp your drink down at the bar. A cappuccino will cost as much as 4.50 euros. This has already prompted Italy’s consumer association to file a complaint with Italy’s antitrust authority, saying the prices were far above average for Milan. Online, Italians are already complaining that Starbucks could drive up prices elsewhere in Italy. (Still, from the coverage, it seems the Roastery piqued people’s curiosity; the lines were around the block for the musical-gala opening party.)

The announcement last year about the opening did not go over well. The columnist Aldo Cazzullo wrote in Corriere della Sera then that “as an Italian,” he considered the opening of Starbucks in Italy nothing short of “a humiliation.” Though he conceded that the arrival of the chain might make some Italian coffee shops step up their game: Starbucks “represents a philosophy, as well as a sort of office for people who don’t have an office,” he wrote. “Maybe our bars will also become more hospitable.”

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But he ended on a discordant note: “I wonder how many of the 350 jobs announced in Milan will go to young Italians and how many to young immigrants,” Cazzullo wrote. It’s unclear what kind of immigrants he had in mind, or why hiring immigrants would be an issue. What is clear is that in Italy, coffee seems to connect in unexpected ways to national identity. There were polemics last year after Starbucks sponsored a garden of palm trees in Piazza Duomo, to drum up enthusiasm ahead of its opening this year. This prompted Matteo Salvini, then only the leader of the far-right League party and now Italy’s interior minister and deputy prime minister, to decry what he called the “Africanization” of Italy, and to call for the defense of the “Italianness” of coffee. “All that’s missing are the sand and camels, and the illegal immigrants will feel at home,” he said then.

Schultz has been trying to open Starbucks in Italy for decades, and the fact that Italy has such excellent coffee everywhere—even the coffee at the average highway rest stops in Italy is better than much of what’s served in good restaurants elsewhere in the world— was no doubt a major issue. In 1998, Michael Specter wrote in The New Yorker about Schultz’s efforts to open Starbucks and said a branch of the chain would open in Italy “next year.”

So why the delay? For one thing, Italians don’t drink coffee the way Starbucks serves coffee. In Italy, coffee—espresso—is drunk generally standing up, at a coffee bar. Cappuccino or caffè latte is drunk in the morning or sometimes in the late afternoon if you haven’t had a proper lunch, and never after meals, because who can digest milk after a meal? Italians are very attuned to proper digestion.