LAST year Hasbro introduced a new version of Monopoly. The limited edition Monopoly Here & Now features new playing pieces to bring the game into the modern era. Gone are the battleship, top hat and so on. In come a labradoodle, an aeroplane and five branded pieces including a carton of McDonald’s french fries, a New Balance trainer and a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Hasbro also updated other features of the game. For instance, rather than collect $200 (¤136.65) each time you pass Go, in the new edition a player collects $2m.

But obviously Monopoly couldn’t imitate real life. If it had, a year on, three of the other players would have become Starbucks mugs and there would be at least one Starbucks on every corner of the board. Do not pass Go. Spend $3.50 on a soy latte instead.

The ubiquity of Starbucks has become a joke almost as common as the coffee shops themselves. Not so long ago, satirical newspaper The Onion claimed Starbucks was opening a Starbucks in the toilet of a Starbucks.

But for the Seattle-based coffee company, the joke isn’t funny any more. Last week, the firm revealed that the amount of traffic flowing through its US stores fell during the fourth quarter — the first dip since the company began disclosing the figure three years ago.

Jim Donald, Starbucks’ chief executive, called the saturation comments “overblown” — but he would, wouldn’t he? The company has said it ultimately plans to double its 10,000 US stores.

For years, rapid expansion has been a strategy that worked. Starbucks was able to throw up new stores, sometimes placing them across the street from each other, while still growing sales. But in the past year growth has slowed. As a result, the company’s shares have have gone into a caffeine downer.

Earlier this year chairman Howard Schultz took his firm to task for expanding too quickly and at the expense of the brand. “Some people,” he wrote, “even call our stores sterile, cookie-cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.”

Some people are also now buying their lattes at McDonald’s, Burger King or Dunkin’ Donuts, which have sharpened up their act when it comes to coffee.

Starbucks has always known that this was coming. All businesses mature at some stage, at which point they have to look for new sources of revenue.

Worryingly for Starbucks, its recent attempts to expand its brand have had mixed results. Selling music has been a hit with customers, but the films it has promoted in stores have had minimal box-office success. Did anyone see Akeelah and the Bee? They should have given free venti Americanos to the audience and thrown in an extra shot.

In some ways, last week’s news feels like the end of an era. We have become used to an ever-expanding universe of Starbucks.

Lewis Black, the American comedian, jokes: “If you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks. And directly across the street, in the exact same building as that Starbucks, there is . . . another Starbucks. There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks! And ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of the universe.”

Perhaps someone should call Stephen Hawking. It sounds like the universe is contracting.

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