On perfect Houston office lunches and coffee

When I'm in the ICIS Houston office, one of my favourite places to get lunch is the local Whole Foods Market on Kirby. That is when I'm not queuing up for slabs of beef at the Texas Bar-B-Q or down the nail salon.

So I was happy to see that a flagship Whole Foods store had opened last year in London's Kensington High Street, bringing the organic supermarket brand to the UK, but now I'm not at all surprised to read that the new venture is facing disaster after making a £10 million ($20m) loss in its first year.

In these economically straightened times, it was just too classy, too expensive, too big and in the wrong place, with no parking.

And while Houston Whole Foods is still thriving, 600 branches of Starbucks are closing down across the US, because they over-estimated how many punters were prepared to pay $2 a cup, and saturated areas with multiple branches.

No problems for Starbucks outside the US though, where the company has plans to "accelerate its international growth." In the UK, saturation doesn't seem to be a problem, with coffee shops now outnumbering even hairdressers and charity shops on every high street. In the Blog's own tiny patch of west London, there are nine coffee shops within five minutes' walk, all packed with teenagers, students and mums with pushchairs, who are all happily paying £2 ($4) a cup to while away the afternoon.

Neither is it a problem in Shanghai, where branches of Starbucks are visible not just in the tourist areas but at metro stations and shopping centres out in the business areas like Songhong Road where the ICIS jv partner CBI offices are.

What's the message here? Is the US consumer with his higher disposable income prepared to pay for good quality food but not coffee, while it's the other way round in the UK? Is the US feeling the pinch before Europe? Or has the coffee craze peaked in the US with Europe and Asia inevitably to follow, albeit a few years down the road?