I’ve had worse coffee, including from a local coffee service that was known by employees of businesses throughout the area as terrible coffee. A company switching to that service was a warning sign.
Regarding Starbucks, it’s okay if you get one of the lighter roasts. It’ll never be as good as a really fancy local place, and I’d rather have Duncan Donuts coffee most mornings, but it’s okay in a pinch.
People don’t go to Starbuck’s for coffee-they go there for liquid dessert, which usually has low coffee content to it. I like my coffee black(not like those of you who claim to like it with nothing in it…just milk or cream), and I have never had a cup of coffee from them that wasn’t burnt. McDonalds is better, as is Burger King and even Jack In The Box. Haven’t tried Black Rock yet-any good?
A Starbucks mocha is an occasional treat for me. I like it just fine. I have a sweet tooth, so I like some of the seasonal coffees, too.
My brother works there so I know their culture is getting better. He gets free coffee every week and their lighter roasts aren’t that bad at all when you make them at home. They have some knowledgeable staff if you find the right locations. They sell decent, if over priced equipment like pour overs and chemexes. In other words, they seem like a good business, so I’m trying to say good things about them even though I basically feel like silenus here about their flaghsip product:
I think that was it. Like all chain stores they wanted a consistent experience. The only way to make coffee beans sourced from all over the world taste the same is to roast them until they’re charcoal. I think they’re getting better on that front, but it’s taking a while because like others said, coffee isn’t really their main business, their customers mostly come for the milk and sugar.
As this thread demonstrates, there are in fact many people who do just go there for the coffee, and not the “liquid dessert.”
Another thing to keep in mind is that fast food and diners used to have absolute shit coffee. Sometime around the turn of the century I remember Denny’s, McDonald’s and others completely revamped their coffee, and now they’re pretty good. So Starbucks probably used to be a lot better than your average fast food coffee and more accessible to a lot of people than independent coffee shops. But the fast food companies squeezed the gap, and now Starbucks looks worse in comparison.
Their regular roast isn’t even a dark roast, so how could it be that they’re roasted “until they’re charcoal”?
No, there aren’t. Starbuck’s lines aren’t long because people order plain coffee a lot-that takes no time at all to prepare.
While I"m sure the majority of people who go there get the fancy pants drinks, I always see a few orders for coffee while I’m there. And I don’t know about long lines. I don’t usually have to wait more than 1-2 minutes to get served.
It’s fine. It sure is coffee! But Starbucks doesn’t sell Combos and beef jerky, and 7-11 does, so I get coffee there instead.
My recollection is that when they first expanded nationwide, their drip coffee was indeed noticeably more expensive than what one bought at a diner or fast-food shop. Since then, places like McDonalds have not only raised the quality of their coffee to be competitive with Starbucks but the price point as well.
Better yet:
Cite.
WHile that’s true (and McD’s has one buck coffees, at least around here, so it is cheaper), when I hear it repeated, it’s mostly in the form of not being expensive coffee, but something like “I don’t want to pay $5 for a cup of coffee.” That is, an absurd price point is given for a regular coffee.
This flies in the face of my personal observations(and yours, according to what you posted), and makes me wonder if this is just Starbucks trying to put to rest the “burnt coffee” stories. Has anyone else here who have watched people order at a Starbucks confirm that a most order just plain coffee with nothing added to it?
I love my espresso without additives, and I find their product undrinkable. Burnt, bitter, no crema, completely lacking in those elements that make espresso worth drinking in the first place. And knowing they use this basically undrinkable espresso as the basis for many of their other beverages makes me avoid them like the plague.
I will admit I’ll drink a regular cup of coffee from them (adding a little creamer and maybe some sweetener on my own) and I can’t find anything to really complain about there. But a coffee specialty shop that can’t produce a decent espresso (and so very many chains can’t) is anathema to me. 
No, it doesn’t. The drip coffee can still be the plurality of their orders without being the majority. Perhaps all the other espresso drinks combined are more popular than the brewed coffee, but the brewed coffee is still by far the highest selling single item. It could be something like a 30-70 split plain coffee vs other drinks. Regardless, that still means a lot of people go to Starbucks for the plain coffee. Your statement was that people don’t go to Starbucks for their coffee, but only liquid dessert. That is clearly not true. Many clearly do go for their coffee.
This I 100% agree with. It’s not a place where I would go to get an espresso, that’s for sure. It’s a place to get serviceable black coffee that is also a convenient meeting place all across the city.
Maybe the time of day you normally go? If you’re going mid-morning on a Saturday, you don’t see the 7 am coffee-on-the-way-to-work crowd.
I’m not sure why I feel I have to defend Starbucks, but it’s just that I see so much complete and utter bullshit about them out there, from “$5 for a cup of coffee” to “they don’t understand what “large” means” to “you can’t order a plain coffee there” to “nobody actually drinks regular coffee there” that I feel the need to chime in, especially on this board. The burnt coffee stuff is subjective; the other stuff is not. It just annoys the crap out of me for some reason, even though 20 years ago they were on my shit list, too.
I like it. I get the dark roast and put in one splenda and a little cream.