The other day I was walking around, thinking about all the different coffee shops I could see, and wondering why people waste their money on starbucks and their burnt-ass coffee.

How much of this is a combination of Gen Z being health conscious, and getting old enough to to have to start paying for things themselves instead of having an personal expense budget like when they were in high school or university?

I live in Seattle so I'm obviously not going to visit them when their are a dozen good small cafés within a stone throw of any Starbucks. On the few occasions that I have been there recently, the specialty drinks (I drink the occasional latte) are terrible. That should not be surprising since they are made by minimum wage teenagers. The food is crap. All of it is overpriced.

Also, fuck Howard Schulz.

Starbucks used to be a pretty decent place. I mean, your preference for how the coffee tasted aside…they used to have newspapers, magazines, couches and other comfy furnishings, nice seating, the pastries were fresh, pretty damn good, and there was a decent variety. Decent coffee-making merch for sale, too. Their menu was coffee and espresso drinks. None of this choco-frosted-sugar-ice-bomb with coffee as an afterthought - if there’s any in the drink at all.

Now? Cheap-ass furniture that invites you to take your coffee and gtfo. Buy a mug or insulated plastic drink glass. Pastries? Let’s pop those out of a plastic bag. Coffee? Minimal. Now it’s the aforementioned sugary drinks or other fruity drinks that have no coffee at all. There is no reason to go there unless your diabetes needs a challenge.

Literally the only thing keeping me buying Starbucks is the loyalty app that gets me a free bag of coffee a couple times a year. Otherwise I’d go elsewhere. Once the loyalty program stops paying out, I’m gone.

Their prices are so expensive. Corporate executives do whatever they need to in order to increase profits right now, even if it destroys a customer base.

Starbucks also often don't have bathrooms anymore. Starbucks used to be a place you could go to, sit down, use a bathroom if you wanted, use the Internet, and then buy something reasonably priced if you felt like it, but also just be there without buying anything.

Now they want KYC through an App before you buy a $20 Latte so you can get a QR code in the App to use a bathroom, if they have one. The enshitification is real and then they are shocked-gasp, shocked!-that fewer people are there. "Why don't they like the QR Codes?"

I like some things from Starbucks, but ever since the manager tore into an autistic girl for having the gall to have boundaries while being sexually harassed, I stopped going. I even reported that POS manager to the DM. Fuck that guy. Girl did nothing wrong and got shit on for "not reporting it the right way", "not working it out like an adult", and "being mean". FFS, the person she was training was the damn poster child for Sexual Harassment and she told him no, she did not want to be touched nor hit on.

I much prefer my local coffee shops, but they are all ~15 minutes away. Only one of them has a decent amount of seating with outlets. The rest are small and don't really accommodate people who want to work for a few hours, which is the main reason I am going to a coffee shop in the first place. The only close one was that Starbucks.

Traffic to its U.S. stores fell again [...] dropping 6%. Domestic same-store sales fell 2%, boosted by an increase in average ticket.

So they had less people come in, and their response was to raise prices.

Last quarter, executives discussed plans to revive the lagging U.S. business that included leaning on discounts

Ah, yes, temporarily lower prices that you'll need to install their tracking app for, I'm sure. They'll use it to dial in the price-point at which each customer is willing to buy, offer "discounts" to just above that price, and then boil-the-frog until it reaches a price acceptable to corporate ...

Lol

Delonghi bean to cup machine has paid for itself £10 of beans a month I have an an aero press at work. It's ruined the thought of paying anything more than£2 for a coffee

I just doing drink coffee so that solves that problem. The last time I went to a Starbucks was when I was on vacation in Florida in 2012

I like good tea, not coffee.

So, you know, I have technically always been boycotting Starbucks I guess.

If people really want a caffeine and sugar fix I can't wait till someone tries a chain of yerba mate places. North America is gonna be wired.

Starbucks gives me apple fanboy vibes..

I have learnt coffee oxidizes quite fast giving that horrible burnt taste, which even milk won't hide. The longer it has been in a open-to-air-pot, the worse the taste gets. Storing in an air-tight container (thermos) it stays "ok" for days. So actually, I think all such servings from the coffee shops are thus inherently worse than brewing your own coffee.

(There are no starbucks in my country, but I think McDonald's coffee really is somehow heated past 100*C and it's the first sip away to burn your mouth, so you wouldn't taste it anyway.)