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More than 60 percent of Vietnam's population was born after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and there is a strong demand among youth in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for branded clothing and accessories, no matter that the labels often are fakes, and average annual income is only about $1,500. Other international food chains have opened stores in Vietnam in recent years, including the Australian coffee chain Gloria Jean's Coffees International, the California-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and the American fast-food chains KFC and Burger King. And Nestle instant coffee
-- engineered to suit the Vietnamese palette -- is sold widely in Vietnamese supermarkets. But Starbucks would risk alienating some of its potential clients if it didn't include Vietnamese drip coffee on its menus here, Emms said. "Say you get a grandfather coming in with a younger relative
-- he might not want to drink a cafe macchiato or latte," he said. Starbucks' announcement that it is moving into Vietnam has been received without much fanfare in local blogs and state-controlled media, although some speculate about how the company will compete with Trung Nguyen Coffee and Highlands Coffee, a homegrown brand that credits Starbucks as an inspiration. Nghiem Ngoc Thuy, meanwhile, is still swooping across the worn tiled floors of her cafe, setting down steaming coffees just as fresh customers arrive to order more. 15,000 dong (75 cents) per cup, she said on a recent weekday afternoon, as cigarette smoke curled toward the ceiling. 1,000 extra for condensed milk. Thuy's family has been in business since the late 1980s, and watched as this leafy neighborhood
-- called "cafe street" by some locals -- has welcomed luxury cars, sushi restaurants and upscale clothing boutiques. A regular customer, electronics salesman Do Thanh Tung, said he is eager to see if Starbucks coffee really is different from the Vietnamese blends he has been drinking since he was 10 years old. "Vietnamese young people will welcome Starbucks, once they get used to it," Tung, now 30, said as he hunched over a silver laptop. But he added that he doesn't expect to become a regular Starbucks patron because he drinks five or six cups of coffee a day, and a latte habit would get expensive.
[Associated
Press;
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