I'm sure that there are a number of attorneys in my office who buy Starbucks every day.
This post was edited by SpunkySenior at July 25, 2019 10:21 PM MDT
No. But I know three coffee lovers who go out of their way to avoid Starbucks even when their cravings are at peak.
Each says Starbucks coffee is dreadful. When I ask why they say the baristas couldn't prepare the type of coffee the way he or she asked.
Reading gourmet coffee mags now and then, I get the impression that it's a complex art - that the best barristers (winners of competitions) are usually artists in their spare time. Apparently, it's not just the variety and freshness of the bean and the roast - or the cleanliness of the machine. It's every tiny detail adding up to the whole, and it's pleasing the customer's exact specifications.
My friends say, one can't get that kind of service from a vast franchise.
I'm a coffee lover's nightmare - I take mine 1/4 strength and swamped with milk because I can't stand too much bitterness. Oh, and I get a drill headache and talk as if I'm on epinephrine - best to avoid those. I've become accustomed to the rolled-eyes and laughter.
This post was edited by inky at July 25, 2019 10:22 PM MDT
I like the malapropism. Barristers earn enough as it is without them moonlighting in pretend-sophisticates' coffee-bars! :-)
I like coffee, though drink more tea. Nevertheless I would have to be pretty desperate to use these chains, be they American like Starbucks, French like Moto, or British like Costa (which I call Costalotta). That's if the latter still is a branch of Whitbreads and not now owned by some spiv in Wall Street, Dubai or the People's Republic of China.
I'm put off by the high-price / low-value business model, the gimmicks, the pseudo-fashion element and that idiotic cod-Italian.
Plain coffee is not American(o): it's plain coffee, as drunk for centuries in countries for whom coffee is nothing new. I never ask for an "Americano": I ask for a "plain coffee please" and sometimes find I have to explain to the staff what that is, preferably still without the daft name.
Ask for a "latte" in a genuine Italian café (i.e. in Italy, and you might be puzzled by no trace of coffee flavour.
I've never used a Starbucks but I have sampled a MacDonalds - the only thing available at the place and time. Otherwise avoided...
My objections are not just the poor value of ordinary beverages served pretentiously, at pretentious prices. That's what initially put me off. Once, in a group travelling to London, we stopped at a service area for coffee. Being fair, everything in these ridiculous establishments is costlier than in the non-motorway shops; and I think we used Costalotta rather than Surplusbucks. Even so, half a cup of milky coffee hidden under a deep head (froth) "ornamented" with pointless squiggles? Even a simple bun was priced to match.
I regard it as sharp practice.
The British pub trade became forced by law to use glasses etched with a pint line so you actually buy a pint of beer, below any head. As a cask-ale drinker I avoid the deep-rooted regional English preferences about the head on beer; but this law ensures you buy a full pint of liquid beer, and can still have that gas-bubble head. (The head is induced on cask, not keg, beer by a special dispensing nozzle to make it look lively, but as it uses the beer's natural, internal CO2, must slightly flatten it!)
Yet there is no Trading Standards equivalent controlling the coffee-shops chains, as far as I know. Unlike the pub glass, you cannot see where the drink starts through an opaque cup that also unlike the beer glass, appears not of legally-minimum volume.
I've also noticed some at least of these chains waste much ground coffee in levelling off measuring-scoops. Who pays for that?
My other objection to these places is their part, like supermarkets and other chains, in flattening town-centres to dreary, American-influenced, ISO9001-style conformity. The buildings might be individual but otherwise, all clone décor; clone menus and recipes from remote database-jockeys; local tastes barred; local or regional foods barred. Eventually the choices offered become spurious: a large category range but narrow choice in each homogenised category, to match the jockeys' databases and tastes. Since we customers then have few or no other choices, the chain owners can make their disingenuous claim to be matching customers' choices!
Once, I tried a Subway sandwich - in my town in South of England. It was well-made, even reasonably priced (!) but the offered condiments included mayonnaise but no salad-cream, because, I was told, the choice was set in New York. Obviously, I said, by people who know nothing of other countries' tastes (mayonnaise and salad-cream are very different, but both are popular in Britain) - and the UK's main salad-cream manufacturer is American (Heinz).
(The UK supermarket Tesco failed in the US by not understanding American shopping habits: ironically the supermarket is an American invention.) X
Slartibartfast 