Apparently, customers can now offer Starbucks suggestions on how to improve their service. Naturally, this makes me all giggly and flushed with spontaneous order.
I therefore rushed to take part of this vast experiment in distributed intelligence. My humble offering: tell the whoever runs the flamethrower they use on their coffee beans to throttle back on the oxygen and leave some actual flavor in the roast. Otherwise it's just too easy for potential customers to economize by dissolving a charcoal briquette in eight ounces of industrial solvent.
People have been calling it "Burnbucks" for years.
The Customer base, of any org, should always be: 1) their best Salesforce, and 2) their R&D Department..
peak-SBUX has been well, and truly, observed..
Really, how did that swill become the market leader in very expensive coffee? It's like Old Grandad dominating the premium bourbon market because they put it in a nice bottle; are upscale hooch hounds simply more discerning than the typical high end java junkie?
It's better in Seattle (but of course, not nearly as good as the independents here). I dispair of finding good coffee whenever I'm on the east coast.
Why in the world would they do that, Megan? Clearly the market has decreed that very dark roasts are what consumers like as evidenced by the success of the Starbuck's franchise.
It's not flamethrowers that are darkening the coffee; it's the Invisible Hand.
It's not the dark roast that everyone likes about SBUX, it's the sugar and fat/dairy that come with it -- a combination that the chain popularized. What fraction of their customers actually drink unadulterated coffee?
disc: I in fact use SBUX roasted / Kirkland branded beans at Costco for $5/lb because I'm a cheap bastard and it tastes just fine. And for the record I think Dunkin' Donuts serves really lousy coffee.
Hey, Andrew, people prefer to listen to hacks who are barely worthy of "American Idol", instead of people who can actually sing, so our fate in life is to be surrounded by stuff that is not our preference, because we got outvoted. That's life.
Matt B., Costco in a lot of locations will use a local coffee roaster who produces much better stuff at the same, if not lower, price. At the Costco near me, every month or so a local coffee roaster sets up shop, hands out samples, and sells a five pound bag of good roast for about 20 bucks. You may want to talk to your Costco store manager; they are a pretty responsive retailer.
Can we get them to drop the 'venti', 'tall', etc. crap?
Will, thanks for the tip. Mostly I pick the SBUX stuff because the size is right -- the 2-lb bags last a month or so. How well does whole-bean coffee keep?
It keeps pretty well in the right conditions, which I won't explain in deatail, given I don't want to use The Atlantic's bandwidth for an extended coffee storage debate; they can be quite contentious. Just google "cofee storage" and make your best guess.
[sigh]
Put the straw man down. Please.
Matt B has it right: Starbucks is immensely popular - and it is; your scorn for their roasting hasn't somehow decreased their hojillions of customers - because it brought Italian-style espresso drinks to America, not because their drip coffee is better than anyone else's.
I personally love Starbucks' mochas, but would never order their "regular" coffee.
I actually detest their regular coffee (and I literally live on coffee), but I love the espresso drinks, and am completely addicted to the mocha latte. From my obervations, most of their customers don't actually order the regular coffee (less than 20%).
Starbucks gets crap for the same reason as Wal-Mart and McDonalds: It is there, and it is the biggest. Try drinking an Arabica blend that sat on the hotplate more than an hour, and fresh SBUX, and then feed me that crap line about SBUX being burnt: there is a real and meaningful difference between actual burnt coffee, and a darkroast that is merely too dark for your preference. Promise.
I only rarely drink at Starbucks whenever I'm in the Pacific Northwest, because shops like Dutch Brothers and Stumptown Roasters are available, or some other excellent local shop or regional chain.
In Colorado, meanwhile, the coffee culture is growing and local companies are starting to appear, but Starbucks is often the only option at certain places and/or certain times of day when I might wish to have an afternoon swig or a perker for the evening commute. And I can order and enjoy Starbucks, including both the regular coffee and the frou-frou stuff.
That's the upshot of not being finicky (I hate the taste of Folgers, even the first cup out of a new can, but that's another story). The more variety you can take in, the more choices you have regardless of where you are.
The advantage of drinking coffee for its drug value is that I can drink any cheap-ass crap and get just what I want. I've noticed that since I don't care what it tastes like, it all tastes pretty good.
"Otherwise it's just too easy for potential customers to economize by dissolving a charcoal briquette in eight ounces of industrial solvent."
I am pretty sure that is the actual definition of coffee.
"Really, how did that swill become the market leader in very expensive coffee? It's like Old Grandad dominating the premium bourbon market because they put it in a nice bottle; are upscale hooch hounds simply more discerning than the typical high end java junkie?
Posted by Will Allen | April 17, 2008 12:00 PM"
Because people are sheep. Chances are the best burger joint in town isn't McDonald's, but there are probably a lot more McDonald's around. Starbucks is everywhere and everyone knows what to expect, so there aren't any surprises in case you are in a hurry. It can actually be cheaper than some local neighborhood places run by people just getting into the business who don't have the capitol to have cheaper coffee, while Starbucks can as a major multinational, so not every chain has to make huge amounts of profit for the company to stay in business. For every 3 or 4 local good places, there is one overpriced crappy one and sometimes you don't want to deal with the mocha that tastes like an airline latte'. When I had an internship in DC, for like the first two weeks I lazily just went to the local Starbucks for coffee and passed by 1) a local mid-Atlantic chain that was somewhat better at times but also overpriced and 2) a local shop that turned out to be rather good. One day I decided to stop being lazy and stopped in and liked it better than the Starbucks, only returning there once in a while if I felt like one of their seasonal drinks.
It seems to me that Starbucks was better than average when they treated their employees ok, but once they had grown big enough that they started self-cannibalizing by opening up too much locations near other locations, the only way to make more money (while wasting money by buying up prime real estate and then building nothing there just to prevent a competitor from doing so) was to cut costs by treating their employees like shit. The employees thus had less incentive to give a shit and got lazy. I've noticed that a lot of Starbucks have stopped steaming the milk and when you complain about your coffee being cold, they act like you're a brat for not wanting to drink $5 lukewarm garbage and the whole idea of steaming milk that is used in coffee seems alien to them.