The coffee sucks, the tables are all filled or dirty and sticky, the outside seating is in a parking lot, baking in the sun, the drive through is backed up to the interstate, the food is re-heated trash that costs a fortune, the atmosphere is boring factory produced trash, and the wifi is so slow it’s like it doesn’t exist.
Why. Why on earth would I go to starbucks
It’s sad to think there are people in the world that think Starbucks coffee is nice.
Yeah, Starbucks finally has a few places here in Copenhagen, but that was after a few years of simply not getting a hold anywhere; shops that opened, stayed for less than a year, then closed.
The competition here is Joe and the Juice, a local company, and various small privately owned baristas.
Starbucks has some permanent places right now, but they’re still not big. Haven’t heard many people say positive things about them.
I’m in India, and when I was in college, first Starbucks in the city was opened and a few of my friends including me wanted to try it. We all spent 500-600 INR ($4-5) which was a lot. After taking the first sip, we all came to the conclusion that the coffee sold at the college canteen for ₹20 was better than this overpriced slop.
I make coffee at my home for less than a dollar and I love the taste and I love the experience.
I’ll go to my local coffee shop if I want a good coffee experience. Starschmucks is a last effort if I am traveling and I really need coffee (think in the airport terminal), otherwise, I go without until I can get something affordable like a gas station with decent drip coffee or a coffee machine. These CEOs are so out of touch it isn’t even funny.
Starbucks coffee is shite. The main reason many people go there is because of the image of status symbol, especially in many parts of the world. The chain also ruffled feathers here in Ireland for setting up shop everywhere, driving down prices of their coffee to force local cafés to close. Then, when local competitions are gone, Starbucks raise prices to extortionate level. For these reasons, I boycott Starbucks. Thankfully, what Starbucks did in Ireland was nipped in the bud, locals prefer their local cafés.
Besides, countries with older café culture rail stronger on the overgrowth of big coffee chains like Starbucks. For example, the coffee chain in Australia never became popular enough. Because Australians see cafe culture as being more community based, where they chat to neighbours and baristas, a habit picked up from Greek immigrants to Australia long before coffee chains took the world by storm.
Look at the wording- ‘premium experience’. He’s not selling coffee, he’s thinking big picture of the whole experience from the moment you walk in the store. He’s not even wrong here. This is good business management- that he’s taking charge of everything about the store from the decor, the furniture, the colors, how the employee talks to you, etc. That’s all part of the experience.
What’s wrong is that people keep going. Most people don’t give a fuck about the experience, they just want a tasty coffee. Our economy is based on competition and free choice. If he makes his coffee cost $8 or $9 or $15 or $50 that’s his right and his company’s right. Just as it is your right to go elsewhere, which you should be doing anyway.
The thing is- IMHO, Starbucks coffee isn’t worth anywhere near $9. Here’s a challenge- go to Starbucks and order a double espresso shot. Now find a local artisan coffee place, like the type with a chalkboard that says where the beans they’re brewing today were grown. And get a double espresso from them also. Compare the two.
What you’ll notice about Starbucks is that it’s burnt. And that’s because it’s literally burnt- the typical Starbucks bean is roasted MUCH darker than average, so the resulting coffee flavor is dominated by a burned smoky bitter-ish flavor.
Compare that to your local artisan coffee place- you’ll notice it’s NOT burnt, the flavor is NOT dominated by smokiness, but you have a lot more layers of flavor. Then order whatever drink you want- better coffee in means better drink out.Keep in mind also most of what Starbucks sells isn’t really coffee, it’s milky sugary drinks that incorporate a few drips of espresso. So you’re paying $9 for a sugary calorie bomb made from overly roasted coffee that just makes you fat.
Also- if you usually order the same thing at Starbucks- just learn to make it. Even if you throw $1000 at a nice fully automatic espresso machine, taking the per-coffee cost from $9 to $1 means you’ll break even on the machine in 125 coffees. For most people that’s less than a year. And you can do it yourself- next time you order, watch what the barista does. They are not wizards and nothing behind the counter is magic. An espresso machine and a blender will make like 95% of the menu. Here’s a guide
Even on a shoestring budget you can get far. My equipment:
10 euro ‘grinder’ 30 euro moka pot (bialetti) Decent beans (segafredo, lavazza) about 10 euro per kilo (on offer), lasts my family about a month.
I like late macchiato, which in my case is about 2 thirds milk heated in the micro, 1 third coffee.
I know the above will horrify real coffee enthusiasts, but I can tell you it’s a lot better than starbucks, and a lot cheaper too.
If you have decent coffee, you get the grind dialed in, and a half decent sub 300€ expresso machine, you can get very very good coffee.
I have owned a small resto in Spain, so I kind of know a bit about expresso.
The coffee experience is 100% subjective, anyway.
Some like light roasts, dark, some Arabica, some robusta, some espresso, pour over, some percolated (I just barfed a little in my mouth here).
There is a lot of bullshit being peddled by coffee influencers who every week have to make a video about the same subject to keep making money, anyway.
did not know sugar got that expensive
I have friends who are super into roasting their own beans and curated coffee experiences…
Starbucks is far and away from being premium or even…good. They’re all marketing and accessibility, not quality.
or go to any other coffee store. phillz, peets(maybe), theres some that are specific to our city that also seells the product to stores. of course make your own, french press or carefe.
Labeling Starbucks coffee as a premium experience is a bold statement. Did he never drank real coffee? “Oh but it’s premium because our coffee tastes so bad, we just add a lot of sugar and flavors to it so you won’t notice.”
I would actually pay $9 for the premium experience of seeing this CEO getting a cup of boiling hot coffee in his face.
The coffee is not the experience. Everything around that coffee is. The mug, the barista with a smile, the friendly words, the lighting, the music there, the seats, the flower pots, …
probably not, hes probably like mcdonald ceo, he likes this “product”
I don’t give a fuck how much they charge for coffee. I don’t know why anyone would. You buy it, or you don’t. It’s not fucking insulin. No one needs to buy their shitty products.
The only reason I would care is to compare it to how much the baristas are getting paid. How many cups of coffee can a barista afford from a single shift, purely from wages? Can a barista even afford a single cup of coffee per hour with their hourly wage? And no, don’t start with the “but it’s a tipped position” stuff. How much does the company pay the barista?
I use this comparison because the McDonalds in my area starts pay at ~$10 per hour before tax, while a Big Mac Meal (arguably the most iconic and popular item on the menu) costs $11.25 before tax. In an eight hour shift, after taxes are factored in, the McDonalds worker can barely afford to buy five meals from the place they’re working at. But how many meals does that worker prepare and serve in a single eight hour shift? Definitely more than five. Probably by several orders of magnitude. So how much profit has the worker brought in, compared to how little they were paid?
To bring it back to the original point, how many $9 drinks does a barista prepare in a single shift? How much profit is made per drink? And how many can the barista afford? This is a video of a man who infamously “commutes” to work across the country via a private company jet, because he refuses to move closer to where their corporate HQ is located. How much company profit does this man consume, simply by traveling to and from work? How much profit from $9 cups of coffee could have gone towards higher barista pay, instead of paying for this man’s commute?
starbucks has a tendancy to shut down coffee shops if they even hear a word of unionization being mentioned. i noticed like 2 of them near my work that were suddenly closed not coincidentally when unionization in another state was being mentioned. and this was a starbucks that was in a pretty high traffic area, tech conferences center is nearby , i always see it packed.
This is really all that needs to be said. Nobody needs Starbucks coffee, so either pay the price or don’t go.
Starbucks is not coffee, its a sugary mess with some coffee involved somewhere
Who goes to Starbucks anyway? That place would not know what a coffee bean looked like if it rained beans. I’m lucky to live in a place where there are the most coffee shops in the world; over 9000 independent coffee shops with some amazing beans.
Shanghai?
Indeed.
Prioritizing “experience” over coffee itself is not new for Starbucks. Even before the $9 price tag, their prices far exceeded their (low quality) coffee because they’re selling the experience.
Coffee roasters sometimes refer to them as “Charbucks.”
They know climate change is about to destroy the coffee industry so they’re getting ready to pivot
I had a Starbucks franchise owner tell me that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; [they] sell an experience.
Then improve the experience, I told him. I seriously have no idea how they’re still around.
Starbucks doesn’t franchise FYI. They have places that sell coffee “Proudly Serve Starbucks Coffee” as well as licensed stores, but those are typically mega corps like Safeway, Target and HMS host.
https://www.tastingtable.com/1633136/we-proudly-serve-starbucks-explained/
Oh, interesting! I didn’t know that!
End of the day it is on us to actually use the tools of haters and trolls to fight back against any of this stuff. But we police ourselves. They trained us to police ourselves away from the tools.
We created the internet. We learned we can use it to shape culture and push back against these rich interests but they also learned it at the same time. So they covertly used bot accounts to push us away from ways to shape our world and instead trained us to use this stuff to post about beans and “its morbing time”
Income cohort…
