As more and more competitors emerged, both individual cafés and chains such as Gloria Jean’s and The Coffee Club, competitive pressures forced Starbucks to impose rigid sales targets on their frontline staff including baristas to increase store productivity. However, the imposition of these KPTs and the pressure to serve more customers more quickly meant that Starbucks forgot the very thing that made it unique in the early days, namely, to provide a customer experience in an intimate casual setting that set it aside from competitors. As more pressure was placed on staff to have higher throughput, this meant that baristas and other employees had little time to engage with customers. In other words, Starbucks forgot about the very things that made it unique in the first place. This is akin to the Wheel of Retailing hypothesis (Hollander, 1960) where a no-frills retailer gradually moves upmarket in terms of variety of product, price and more services and within several years finds itself competing with the more established premium supermarkets that were the very competitors that they tried to distance themselves from in the first place. The only difference with Starbucks is that it reversed the direction of the Wheel – by gradually moving downmarket it brought itself into direct competition with cheaper operators and lost sight of what made it successful in the first place.