Starbucks opens its first store in Italy in Milan

The cycle of contempt, at the Italian

At the Milan roaster, an espresso will cost € 1.80 "sitting or standing". Corriere della Sera noted, since in Italian cafes, the price changes depending on whether you have a table service or that you drink your drink at the bar. A cappuccino will cost up to € 4.50. This has already prompted the Italian consumer association to file a complaint with the Italian antitrust authorities, claiming that prices were well above average for Milan. Online, Italians are already complaining that Starbucks could push up prices elsewhere in Italy. (Yet, according to the cover, the Roastery seems to have piqued people's curiosity, the lines were around the block for the opening night of the musical gala.)

The announcement last year about the opening was not done well. Columnist Aldo Cazzullo wrote in Corriere della Sera then, as an Italian, he considered the opening of Starbucks in Italy as a "humiliation". Although he admitted that the arrival of the chain could encourage some Italian coffees to win. Starbucks "represents a philosophy and a kind of office for people who do not have an office," he wrote. "Maybe our bars will also become more welcoming."

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But he concluded on a discordant note: "I wonder how many of the 350 jobs advertised in Milan will go to young Italians and how many to young immigrants," wrote Cazzullo. We do not know what kind of immigrants he had in mind or why hiring immigrants would be a problem. What is clear, it is that in Italy, coffee seems to connect unexpectedly to the national identity. Last year, there was controversy after Starbucks sponsored a palm garden in Piazza Duomo to inspire enthusiasm before it opened this year. Matteo Salvini, then leader of the far right party and today Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, was decrying what he called "l '". Africanization "of Italy and called for the defense of" Italianity ". of coffee. "All that is missing is the sand and the camels, and the illegals will feel at home," he said.

Schultz has been trying to open up Starbucks in Italy for decades and the fact that Italy has such a good coffee everywhere – even the coffee on the motorway routes in Italy is better than most good restaurants elsewhere in the world – was no doubt a major problem. In 1998, Michael Specter wrote in New Yorker about Schultz's efforts to open Starbucks and said that a branch of the chain would open in Italy "next year".

So why the delay? On the one hand, Italians do not drink coffee as Starbucks serves coffee. In Italy, coffee – espresso – is drunk, usually standing, in a cafe. The cappuccino or coffee with milk is drunk in the morning or sometimes in the late afternoon if you have not eaten properly and never after meals because who can digest the milk after a meal? Italians are very sensitive to digestion.