The scene is downtown Madrid, Spain, approximately 8 PM in early October.
At a loose end, I wander into a Starbucks (I want to call it an Estarbuques) and scan the menu. No beverage is below €2, and they’re the same as they are in North America.
I leave in a pique, go next door to the independent café that I really should have gone into in the first place, and get a really, really stellar café con leche for €1.50.
I WILL still be around a few years from now and remember that bunch of folks who walked past me like they have a better planet to be on and wonder if they feel like the fucking jerks that they are now,then.
Fuck starbucks and the fucking drama that is the customer base.
I’m with you. Only started drinking coffee a few years ago, and I started with Frappuccinos. Now I’ve got a serious reputation for showing up to work with a BrewKeg 52 Oz. container filled with about 40 Oz of coffee and 10-12 Oz of ice. Puh-lenty of non-dairy creamer, flavored hazlenut. ( Gave up Frapp’s when I became lactose intolerant, but I do remember the glory days of summertime with those things. )
TONS of Splenda. Lots of creamer. And yeah, a bucket o coffee. I get the whole burnt thing, thats’ why I use coffee as Anastasaeon does. Sure does get me jazzed for most of the day.
Cartooniverse
Re the taste of coffee - I like chocolate plain, too, but also like chocolate with mocha, chocolate with blueberry, chocolate with rosehip, chocolate with peanut butter… Same with coffee - it tastes good mixed with other stuff!
Starbucks, though, is a treat to me because it’s just too darn expensive and I’m cheap. The QT station by my house has 49 cent, any-size coffee right now. I fill it halfway with a mixture of vanilla and “mighty mocha” cappucinos, and then fill the rest with regular coffee. (When I’m in the mood for a twist I mix the coffee with their peanut butter hot chocolate.)
It’s different from Starbucks but very good in its own way.
And?
I am not allowed to make a mistake? I am not a botanist, and the first 2 beans that popped into my mind were mocha and arabica. I drink arabica - generally colombian but i did have a nice kenyan visiting friends up in Boston a week or so ago. Robusto is less expensive, but also harsher.
Next time I will be certain to google, and post when i am not on my way somewhere… :rolleyes:
Though I’ve always enjoyed Starbuck’s frozen coffees, I recently read about the scandal that happened on 9/11. After that I’ve just avoided them as a principle.
Yes, that poster was terribly insensitive. 
I wouldn’t hold the water thing against Starbucks – that’s obviously an instance of random assholia. It’s not like it was a corporate directive.
No, fuck them for their asshole employees and jackassed executives.
I will never give tarbuck another dime of my money because of this. (Not that it’s any big effort for me, since they’re coffee tasted like ass, IMHO.)
I’m not really sure what to add to this except yeah, Starbucks sucks. It totally baffles me how a company that large can make that much money on bad coffee. Now, I’m a bit of a coffee snob and I’ll only drink espresso from a few places. But I’ll drink any brewed coffee I can get my hands on- I think Denny’s coffee is the bee’s knees. But Starbucks coffee is just unusually and noteably bad.
The price doesn’t help. I went in to find some hot eggnog and nothing on the menu was under four bucks. Four bucks is about what I want to spend on lunch, not on a glass of milk. Thank god for living somewhere where there are other options.
Cough You have to admit, given the tone of your post and general show of authority on the subject, that was quite a very–and I do mean very–basic mistake to make. It has nothing to do with being a botanist, but if you are a self-professed coffee snob (which is fine), you should know this stuff.
But otherwise, I agree with parts of your post. I don’t get why people drink blueberry coffee, but, hey, tastes differ. The other day, in a moment of what can only be described as temporary insanity, I decided to try 7-11’s Cranberry flavored coffee. Oh. My. God. This stuff was wretched. Some would point out that my initial error occured in going to 7-11 for coffee but, I have to admit, I ldon’t mind their coffee, and I actively enjoy Dunkin Donuts coffee. And, having been a barista for 3 years in my college days, I do think of myself as somewhat of a coffee snob.
No offense, but being hired and trained as a barista doesn’t make you an expert in the nuances of coffee beans. It makes you an extremely high-speed processor of aural instructions and something of an excellent human-mechanical interface device, capable of multi-tasking.
The truth is that if they chose to do so, 7-11 could build a countertop, sell Spyro Gyra CD’s and nine dollar scones and hire people to blend the aforementioned cranberry coffee swill and call those hire guns baristas too. No? Yes. If you want to become an expert in the botany and preparing and roasting, shipping, preserving and handling of coffee beans, I suspect that working next to an Italian espresso machine for 10 hours a day in a Starbucks ain’t the way to go about it.
I shot a job for La Minita Coffee Beans. I spent a week in Costa Rica at Hacienda La Minita, learning a bit of how these beans are grown, harvested, graded, hand-spread and dried, roasted and so on and so forth. It’s part science, part tradition and as near as I could tell, part pure zen- to learn to roast the perfect pound of beans. ( or, ton ). The folks who own and run the place are real experts. They understand botany, land use, chemistry and so on.
I never really understood the whole coffee snob thing, or wine snob thing for that matter. For one person to declare out loud that another person is an idiot or dullard or posessed of gutter tastes and a lack of class and elan, because they happen to have taste buds that tell them that Mobil On The Run Hazlenut coffee tastes fine, is just beyond me. You like what you like what you like.
You’re allowed to make all the mistakes you want, but when you adopt a superior and condescending tone when deigning to lecture folks on coffee basics, expect to be mocked when you make as elementary mistake as you did.
Settle down, you two, or I’m gonna make you both switch to decaf.
Daniel
On the thread’s topic: I’ve very rarely had a flavored coffee that tasted like the flavor (I think the pecan-coffee was the best: pre-grinding you could actually see the chunks of pecans mixed amongst the beans). Most flavored coffee tastes the same to me, a hint of artificial candy-flavor buried beneath a very strong “chemical” flavor, something that I expect to make my mouth break out in lesions from drinking. I avoid flavored coffee not because I’m trying to be a snob, but because I can’t stand that chemical harshness.
I wish I made better coffee; unfortunately, a lot of the time, mine comes out bad, even though I buy good beans and grind them at home. My best guess is that I either grind the beans too fine or too coarse, or my drip coffeemaker doesn’t heat the water sufficiently.
Daniel
I stopped drinking Starbucks awhile back because their employees can’t be bothered to get a simple order right.
When I first started going there sometime in the mid 90’s I would ask for a Vanilla Frappuccino and get exactly that. Sometime early in the new millenium, asking for a Vanilla Frappuccino began yielding some white-colored concoction that tasted sort of like a vanilla milkshake with little chunks of ice in it but worse. After getting that a few times I adapted and learned that I now needed to be ordering a Vanilla Coffee Frappuccino. Fine. But it was just about this time that they started adding whipped cream to the top of them. Since that is totally gross, I invariably ask for it without the whipped cream and they invariably put it on there anyway. I’m curteous about it when they are busy and don’t say anything, but the times when they aren’t so busy and I say something, they generally give me a disgusted look, grunt at me, and then jerk the cup out of my hand, scrape the vile cream in the trashcan with the lid, replace the same tainted lid, and hand the cup back to me.
Recently, I had been helping a coworker out a lot and she really wanted to buy me lunch. I kept politely declining because I almost always meet my wife for lunch, and on the days I don’t do that I typically bring my lunch and go to the library. Finally she talked me into letting her buy me something from Starbucks and I wrote on her list, “Vanilla Coffee Frappuccino with no whipped cream.”
Guess what I got.
Of course not. But baristas should be trained in the basics, such as ensuring that freakin’ crema appears on each and every espresso you make. In the cafe I worked at, none of our process was automated. We had big honking Italian hand-pull machines and were taught to toss any espresso that did not have a layer of crema completely covering the top of the coffee. First time I worked, a customer tipped me five bucks because he saw me screw up an espresso (didn’t tamp it tight enough)and I made another one instead of trying to flog the subpar drink on him.
Granted, I guess you don’t get this at Starbucks, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t know the basics about the product you’re serving. You should know how a Mocha bean tastes versus a Sumatra versus a Kenya AA versus Columbian. You should know how various degrees of roasting affects flavor and caffeine levels.
It’s like when I go into a bar with a good beer selection. Sometimes they have beers I’ve never tried before, and I need guidance into what I like. The bar staff need not go down to the brewery and watch the entire brewing process in action to help me make a pick, but they should have the taste and vocabulary to be able to guide me. They should be able to say “yeah, the Victory Pils is pilsener-style beer, but more a little more aggressively hoppy than the style would suggest” or something like that. I expect the same interest and care for the product in a barista.
twitch twitch
FWIW, IMHO, YMMV, etc… Starbucks does attempt, and often succeeds, in properly training SOME staff. Just how many of them receive adequate training and then go on to share that knowledge with other employees is a key question. With the insight I’ve received dating a satisfied and talented Starbucks employee within the last year, and observing said person “in action” in two very different stores, with two very different staffs, two very different pools of customers, in two very different places and environments, I think most of the problems with Starbucks are due to the same usual suspects as can be found everywhere else: poor management and staff apathy.
I’ve seen a textbook store in action, and it is amazing how a tightly run ship makes such a huge difference in every conceivable way. From the flavor and quality of the products prepared and consumed, to the overall moods and sex lives of the employees and their significant others at home. 
Pulykamell, well said. I agree, training and positive attitude DOES matter. You have to care, but that level of caring is hard to find in a lot of employees. It isn’t just the pay scale, it’s overall apathy regarding work, lack of work ethic, etc. ( Another thread, clearly. )
honeydewgrrl, it’s the difference between a Venti decaf Macchiado With A Shot of Caramel in Peachtree City and the same in Fairburn. 