Costa, in my opinion, sells a decent cup of coffee. It employs polite youngsters who seem happy in their work. If you’re desperate for caffeine, even its petrol-station vending machines are not too bad. And unlike the UK operation of Starbucks, whose coffee is vile, it pays tax on its profits at close to the full rate of corporation tax. Founded by two Italian brothers in London’s Vauxhall Bridge Road in 1971, it’s a triumph of brand development — and a credit to its current owner Whitbread, which acquired Costa as a diversification from its own traditional brewing business in 1995. Now Costa has been sold to Coca-Cola for a handsome £3.9 billion: no wonder Whitbread chief Alison Brittain called the deal ‘absolutely stonking’.
But is there a downside? Having prospered selling nutritionally worthless beverages to the world’s poor, Coca-Cola is an authentic monster of capitalism — but has also been a benign owner of Innocent Drinks, the smoothie maker that was once a hip London start-up, and there’s no reason to expect it to damage the Costa format. More troubling is the point I’ve made before, that much as we’d like to boast of our native entrepreneurs building giant digital technology companies, they generally don’t: instead, they build and sell the likes of Costa, Innocent, Tyrrells Crisps, Dorset Cereals and the Pret A Manger and Eat sandwich chains. Kings of the snack economy we may be, but will that save our bacon?
Walking the plank
So farewell Paul Pester, the TSB chief executive who has finally walked the plank in the wake of the IT failures that afflicted his bank in April and reportedly have not gone away. Pester’s initial response to the fiasco — prickly, defensive, insensitive to customers’ woes — hit all the wrong notes.
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