Well, the coffee at Starbucks isn’t very good. Isn’t that a sufficient reason?
That movie was shot in Vancouver. Coincidence? I think not.
Preach it Stranger! I don’t know much about Italian or coffee, but I’m pretty sure “Tall” is a stupid name for your smallest size, “Grandé” is a completely useless term for your medium size, and “Venti” for large makes everyone who orders one look like a total mook. Every time I’ve had to order a Starbucks coffee I’ve cringed in shame.
And for me it’s the opposite. Starbucks have all the atmosphere of McDonald’s. Bland, bland places to sit down and have a cup o’ joe. If I’m in a car, I might use a Starbuck’s drivethrough. If I’m in an airport, I don’t have much choice. But usually, if I have the free time and in the city, I much prefer the mom & pop neighborhood places. They have more atmosphere, serve better coffee (if you know where to go), and are cheaper.
At least in my experience. I don’t understand the comments about “surly employees.” All the coffeeshops I frequent have wonderful and knowledgable staffs. It’s like a neighborhood bar, but with coffee. I get free drinks from time to time, am able to run a tab, and have better coffee than SB’s to boot. The local mom & pop is a nieghborhood hang-out, a place to chat with friends, a place like “Cheers” where everybody knows your name. Starbucks is…well…lacking in all that. It’s a place to get coffee—marginal somehwat burnt-tasting coffee, at that—and not much else.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Starbucks.
Bad Coffee- Starbucks coffee is more bitter than most other coffee. My Grandma, bless her heart, bought me a big bag of Starbucks coffee for Christmas. It can’t compete with even cheap blends from Peets. It tastes different than other coffee and it’s not better
They also don’t teach their baristas to pull a good cup of espresso. Making espresso isn’t a unskilled process. It requires that you grind coffee to a certain size tamp down the coffee to a very specific density, get the water to just the right temperature, and (most importantly) let the water run a very specific amount of time. Five seconds too long and it’s bitter, five seconds too short and it doesn’t have the all important crema. I recognize that few people really care about a good cup of espresso, but for someone that really loves coffee it’s like watching a McDonalds burger flipper try to make filet mignon. The ingredients might be there, but the talent isn’t and the product suffers.
They also inspired the proliferation of “coffee drinks” that are more sugar, chocolate and milk than anything else. This puts off a lot of purists.
Finally, they just don’t love coffee. My neighborhood coffeeshop runs limited specials when they find a particularly interesting coffee from the far reaches of the world. They seek out the best, the most interesting, the widest variety of coffee they can. It’s like going to a specialty cheese shop instead of buying a hunk of cheddar from the supermarket. You can live with cheddar, but isn’t it nice to have good cheese? Especially considering that Starbucks coffee isn’t particularly cheap. If I want bad coffee, I can get that fine at the gas station. Why bother paying a few bucks for it?
Bad Atmosphere- Coffeehouses are usually gathering places…kind of community spaces. Most locally owned coffeehouses really serve their community. They show the work of local artists on their walls. They provide a venue for events like open mic nights, local bands, poetry readings, and small books signings. The allow places for small groups to meet, students to study, lovers to love and artists to create.
Starbucks doesn’t do that. Starbucks is one of only two (out of about eight) coffeeshops in downtown Santa Cruz without a full calander of events. I don’t know if they’ve changed, but they used to be the only place without free wireless internet access. Their stores are full of wierd merchandise and for some reason “Cranium” games instead of comfy chairs, tables to work on, and small stages. It’s a place you may linger for a half hour, but not the sort of place to spend an afternoon working on your novel. You wouldn’t want your reading group to meet there. They wouldn’t like it either. It’s just not a comfy “at home” kind of place, and it doesn’t feel like it belongs to the community.
Bad Politics- Their business plan relies on putting local businesses out of business. This takes money out of the community and funnels it to Seattle, which frankly gets enough of our money.
They also arn’t dedicated to serving fair trade coffee. Most coffee is farmed in near-slave labor conditions, and most smaller coffeeshops try to keep everyone involved in their business in mind. Starbucks fought Fair Trade coffee laws in Berkeley, and will probably never take responsibility for where they get their coffee from.
This is 100% wrong. They absolutely DO teach the proper way of pulling a shot. I worked for SB for a year and everyday I challenged myself to make perfect shots. It’s much harder than you might think to do that, and keep track of the orders, and keep up with people’s post-drink-completion requests/changes, and make the f**cking frappaccinos. I suggest you try it yourself before saying “They also don’t teach their baristas to pull a good cup of espresso.” You have no idea how much love I would put into my drinks just to get attitude everyday from people who treated us like slaves. Now Starbucks is switching over to completly automated grinder/press units that take all the fun out of it. There were plenty of people at my store (Beth Isreal Hospital, Boston, MA) that were completely devoted to the ideal of making Starbucks the best place to relax and have a good drink, afterall we knew how much people would spend daily at the place. 
RE: the coffee. The stores should usually change up the kind of coffee they serve and any good store will usually allow a french-press tasting if you request it at a conveint time. Saying across the board “Starbucks coffee is bitter” well, there are 15-20 different varieties so I find that hard to believe. Also it matters if the coffee pots are being cleaned properly, many stores I’ve seen don’t do it the right way.
You do realize that Starbucks has to provide beans for all its stores and keep a regular inventory right? That would be easy for 1-5 shops sure, try doing it for 1400 then supply problems arise.
There was a lot of talk of things like this at the stores I would work at, basicaly it works like this (in Boston, MA):
open mic nights, local bands, poetry readings, and small books signings These things are great but have difficulty surviving in a corporate enviroment. Bands, open mic, etc need licenses and such that the individual Managers have to persue. Just because one SB doesn’t have the things you mentioned, it doesn’t mean they all don’t have that. The Boyleston Starbucks is exactly the place you describe. There is local art on the walls, big comfy couches, two long tables for people to work on, people can and will spend all day in the place, the performance aspect isn’t there because of the above problems.The wireless is not free because SB is in a relationship with T-Moble to provide pay-internet. Plenty of people happily seem to pay anyway. I’ll give you that Starbucks sells waaaay too much crap though.
How do you succeed at a business unless you’re gaining customers from other competing business? You seem hostile to Seattle for some reason which I don’t understand. There are plenty of other giant coporations that you probably do business with every day that funnel money somewhere else. Hating a highly visible one(or two…?) is really a cop-out.
Working at SB was good times and they have excellent employee benifits. I never did manage to understand how people would come in and spend six dollars on a drink, every single day, but they do. en masse. You may find fault with the company but really you should be disgusted with people in general.
I dislike Starbucks because they serve coffee, and I hate coffee and do not drink it or any caffeinated beverage, ever.
As a business though I have no problem with them, capitalism is what it is. Nothing wrong at all with what they allegedly did to this “Petterson’s” coffee shop.
I’ve worked as a barista and make espresso for myself nearly daily, and I appreciate the hard work that everyone behind the counter does. People can get especially bitchy about coffee and the pressure can get intense. I’m not saying their employees arn’t good people or hard workers, just that their corporate policy doesn’t seem to focus on making excellent coffee, even though some heroic employees do try.
Maybe they do teach their baristas to make espresso, but when I order espresso there is no crema in sight. Perhaps my market is saturated with fun-to-work-at coffeeshops that respect their employees and expect their customers to do the same, and so my Starbucks gets stuck with bored high schoolers. Maybe they just don’t try since most people going to Starbucks here are in it for the name value, not for the coffee. I dunno. But they don’t make good coffee in Santa Cruz.
theLaughingMan, I really don’t understand what you didn’t get about my post. You are completely right that Starbucks, as a mega-corporation, can’t provide the same things a local coffeeshop can. This is why I go to local coffeeshops and why I am arguing that local coffeeshops are better.
For some reason I feel to keep protecting Starbucks. Here is the theory about the size names I came up with. “Tall” “Grande” Venti" Mention those to anybody and they’ll most likely know you’re talking about Starbucks. Instant brand recognition. FWIW it used to confuse us the Baristas too, which is why we would talk about it every so often. Random tidbits: Venti is italian for 20, and “Venti” is 20oz, “Tall” has one shot, “Grande” two, and “Venti” suprise! has two. If the barista’s nice and they’re using the older machines ask for the other shot(after they’ve pulled the shots, before they put the lid on), if you ordered a “Tall” They usually just throw it out. Did you know: because of the McDonalds hot-coffee lawsuit, baristas are forbidden to serve un-lidded drinks?
It seems like there is incredible variation on what a Starbucks can be, I’ve been to one in Conneticut that was huge it had a central fireplace(the kind with all glass sides), magazines for reading, and the staff there was the kind of people I would’ve loved to just shoot-the-sh*t with all day… YMMV
You knowingly go into Starbucks and order esspresso, knowing that it won’t come out right, and you pay the monolithic corp the privilage of you being dissapointed by one employee that isn’t paying attention? :dubious: And you obviously are just as biased as I, because you worked as a (presumably non-Starbucks) Barista who did all of the things that [sarcasm] all Starbucks don’t do [/sarcasm] that I did everyday.
What is Starbucks “name value”? Isn’t it coffee? I don’t go to Starbucks to get my oil changed. I go for coffee (well, esspresso). If you’re ever in Boston, MA check out the Boyleston Starbucks, it might be a bit different than you used to.
<sigh> I used to be able to say I lived 150 miles from the nearest Starbucks, but then the @#@# university HAD to have a Starbucks on campus, so technically there is one within a few miles. I don’t count it, though, because it’s deep in the heart of campus - you never see it advertised, and it isn’t really someplace that anyone other than the students go to.
That said, I’ve had Starbucks coffee before, and I tend to agree with the quote in National Geographic a few months ago - Starbucks isn’t in the coffee business, they’re in the milk business. Their coffee is horrendous. If you want a milkshake, sure, they make a pretty good milkshake. But coffee? Yuk.
We are blessed with a local roaster who set up on the main drag of town, making kick ass freshly roasted coffee. When you go in and get a cup of coffee, they brew it for you one cup at a time, using a cone that fits on top of a cup. Their coffee - plain ol’ coffee, not Super Mocha Espressochino - is wonderful. And unless and until this town gets an economic base (hasn’t happened for the past 100 years, don’t expect it to happen soon), Starbucks will not be interested in closing them down.
To Freejooky- very little here has actually addressed your post-
Summary of your post-
I like the atmosphere & product at Starbucks. I don’t like A & P of Mom&Pops. But I feel guilty.
My response- Screw guilt. Unless what you like is evil, harmful or illegal, go with the business that works best for you.
For what it’s worth, when I worked at the Borders cafe, a girl was there who worked at Starbucks before transferring over. On her first day there they showed her how to pull a shot exactly once, and then left her to her own devices along with a recipe card. At Borders (hardly the local mom and pop coffee shop, I know) I trained for two weeks before I was allowed to be on my own.
I’m guessing, though, that this is much more an indication of poor managing at that particular Starbucks than Starbucks on the whole. There’s only so much uniformity that can applied - at some point, the people who work there start making a huge difference.
The Starbucks in Ann Arbor, MI (the first one that appeared a few years ago) regularly had poetry readings, open mic nights, etc.
But I still don’t like their coffee.
Hipsters?
They’re expensive and they’ve run the mom-n-pop shops out of town. Reason enough to hate 'em. They have a million locations. They don’t need to set up camp within the territory of the independents
SB broke my heart when it discontinued the Tazoberry drinks. I took it as more poo flung at non-coffee drinkers.
I agree that there is dislike generated by their mega-corp status. I think the fact that they are rather expensive (at least in Canada), and their kind of uppity atmosphere don’t help things. I think they have great-tasting stuff, though, so I do like them.
They discontinued the Tazoberry drinks?!? Okay, that pisses me off. I really liked those.
(Am I the only person who really likes Dunkin’ Donut’s coffee?)
I dislike Starbucks mainly because of the acid/burst taste of their coffee but it sounds like this mom & pop place really needs to go out of business… what’s the dilema?
BTW, there is a spot on Dupont Circle here in DC where you can stand and see FOUR starbucks all within a block radius of each other.
I find blue collar coffee to be some of the best - whether it be Duncan Donuts or Silver Diner I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad cup of coffee at one of those places. Dunno why that is…