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premium experience
I don't think I've ever had coffee from Starbucks that didn't taste cheaper than the grocery store coffee I buy for home. It has always tasted burned and too heavy for a light roast. Genuinely the shittiest coffee I could get outside of a 7-11 at a cafe that seems engineered to make me not treat it like a cafe.
yeah it tastes like fuckin charcoal, idk if they just roast it way darker than it says or if it's actually burnt somehow
Yes they literally just burn the beans to absolute shit to "standardize the consistency" across all locations and over time.
Also, I presume, to aid in upselling people on syrup and heavy cream filled versions that hide the taste of their terrible, terrible coffee.
I believe they add more caffeine to their coffee so that their regulars don’t get the same “hit” at other coffee shops.
Yeah this isn’t, $9 a cup for a rare single origin grown on some remote island and brewed using a fussy, labor intensive process. This is $9 for Dunkin Donuts with a bougie veneer.
Got coffee at a random gas station a year ago for two or three dollars and I was shocked at how good it was. Pretty sure it was Rwandan. I only buy coffee bean(i)s, grind them, and use a bialetti at home. Fancy cafés rarely impress me but this random gas station blew every starbucks I’ve ever been to completely out of the water.
The second best coffee in a 10 minute walk from me is a gas station, they got a great setup installed like 10 years ago. Definitely the best banf for your buck cause its also cheap
These days Starbucks has a lot of different drinks and even regional variation, so it’s not that true anymore that they only sell this one kind of dark roast. But it’s still very overpriced
one year later
"it's not an $11 dollar coffee, it's a $10 coffee!"
It's not over-priced. It's a premium experience!
Does that mean that it will be cheaper if you just go through the drive-through?
The drive-through is the ultimate luxury experience if you have car-brain.
Drive thru coffee shops should be illegal.
Drive-through anything should be illegal. It's tied with surface parking lots and massive highways for the most wasteful land use ever conceived.
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying but when I've got to be on the job for 6am i already want to die don't make me have to get out for my bean juice
Ideally, we should be pushing for a world without personal cars so you can just grab a coffee on foot after you get off the bus/train but I know the current reality is very far off from that
There used to be entire cars in the train dedicated to providing you with beverages and food on the train 
But I personally remember they used to have drink carts and functioning vending machines
In the ideal world I might still need to drive my tools around to different sites that aren't connected to transit. I've always wanted to transit to work but not having a consistent destination makes it far more stressful and cumbersome
Idk how much space and weight your tools take up but those stacked containers that go on a hand cart are pretty nice for transit. That said, vehicles for work wouldn't need to be banned if they're actually functional and necessary for the job. But I want every motherfucker driving a lifted truck with an empty bed to cry as it gets dismantled and scrapped in front of them.
But I want every motherfucker driving a lifted truck with an empty bed to cry as it gets dismantled and scrapped in front of them.
Right there with you
There's one near me that actually lets you walk up and order. I've found it so much quicker doing it that way than waiting in line. Plus I like to stretch my legs a little. Then again I will also wake up and happily walk a mile.
When I worked at a Starbucks drive thru, we adamantly wouldn't serve any walk up customers. Saddest one was a big rig trucker trying to get a hot cup of joe at 6am and he couldn't fit the truck in the drive thru and the lobby didn't open until 7. I think I gave him a cup of coffee anyway, but my manager insisted we couldn't help him
I'd need some of the caffeine first before walking a mile, for sure. A walk up window would be cool, though
I would like to order one (1) “the experience of living my life without the ecological sword of Damocles threatening the biosphere and my future” please.
If capitalism can sell me that I will cease advocating for its abolition.
Until then they can all fuck off, their “experiences” can suck my toes. What other experiences are on the table? Or maybe off the table or under it. The “experiences” life under capitalism has provided.
You ever think about that? How we’ve all had to do fucktons of emotional labor in order to process living on a dying fucking world to ourselves and each other? Where’s my motherfucking salve for the existential dread and the scars I earned battling it. My mental health at having to make peace with my doom did suffer and I’d like some fucking recompense.
The demand for a livable future isn't high enough for the supply to correct and raise to meet it.
Since the pandemic started, Starbucks and other shops with cozy seating + WiFi have become essentially “work from home” quasi-third-spaces. I haven’t been everywhere but I noticed it was extreme when I passed through Texas and throughout the Midwest. I am pretty sure it’s an everywhere thing
Faced with this, these cafes have two choices. One is to double down on laptop-free rules, either permanent or on weekends only. This can piss off customers and lose business. The other option is to double down on being an office space with a coffee bar. Starbucks and others have been moving this latter direction for years now. Drive-thru was always a ripoff, but now it is truly beyond the pale to order from these places if you aren’t planning to spend a few hours using the amenities.
This has been a thing since wifi became free in cafes. In my experience it's a thing around the world in cafes with dedicated seating. Especially cafes with electrical outlets. I don't think anything will make it go away. There's a demand for third spaces that has nowhere else to replace it right now
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/coffee-shops-limit-wi-fi-to-discourage-laptop-hobos/
The magnitude of it is on a different level since 2020. Dialectics quantitative change producing qualitative change yada yada
There have always been people on laptops in cafes but WFH introduced a new and mainstream reason to do it on a large scale. Combined with economic challenges in the coffee industry, it’s a no brainer to rebrand as a workspace instead of a specialty coffee shop
This might be somewhat region dependent. In many cities, if you go in any coffee shop on a weekday, it will have 100% of seats occupied by people on Zoom calls
it sounds like the cafés need to install call booths and charge half-hourly for those
10% margin. 90 cents out of every $9 coffee cup is going directly into shareholder finances. That's not beginning to account for the standard exec salaries and other profit embezzlement.
20% operating margin overseas btw.
Honestly I'm shocked it's not higher with what their prices are.
That's where massively overinflated exec salaries and "contractors" conveniently owned by shareholders and their friends come in. I'd actually argue most of the overinflated price in companies comes from these "willing" inefficiencies that rich people use to siphon profit off into their own pockets specifically because only getting 10% of the free money isn't enough and the greed can never end.
Oh for sure, there was that study on the price hikes during the supply chain disruptions when COVID really started to kick off that found that 60% of the price increases were attributable entirely to naked corporate greed.
: “I want a raise!”
: “Noooo! That tyranny hurts the economy!”
: “I want a raise!”
: “Of course, let people do what they want!”
One of my favorite pro-union arguments is rich people most certainly unionize themselves. Capitalists are the real lazy bureaucrats.
old mate steve jobs would have a field day with music pricing nowadays.
(also tf is premium experience, it's a coffee with socket plug)
Yeah but the staff are forced to draw cute things on your cup and they play taylor swift
Elites just can't help themselves but open their mouths and say the dumbest shit possible. Silence would be a better PR strategy!
$9 is a can of coffee I can make at home and space out over a week. idgaf about the E X P E R I E N C E
Where?
No really where? A can of like folgers or maxwell house trash is like $18 here
Yeah but wouldn't that last longer than a week? $10 a week for at home coffee costs seems pretty reasonable no? I probably spend about $40-50 a month for some pretty decent beans from a smaller roaster
9 dollars is a bag of beans that lasts two weeks. Where are y'all getting your coffee?
I only get instant coffee because I solely use it for cooking or serving guests.
I think the possibilities of why he's said this are between:
A. He's trying to find a diplomatic way of saying 'We want more money; suck it up'
or
B. He does actually believe what he's saying because he's as detached from the average person as any other billionaire
Isn’t Starbucks on the BDS list anyway
The Arrested Development joke is gonna be real.
As all these companies are pushing towards the right side of the supply-demand curve thingy, they're getting more per customer and less customers.
Liberals call this "economic efficiency" and remark that they are seeing growth. Others might call it "less production" and remark that this counts as degrowth.
As a crisis of overproduction brews, the GDP numbers go up and investment money chases after plentiful profits.
Yet, populism keeps growing more popular. Do the poors not see? All is well under the bourgeois heavens!
I can make my own coffee thank you very little. Best cup of coffee I ever had was from beans I ground in a burlap sack with a hammer because I accidentally bought whole coffee beans instead of ground coffee, put in a Moka pot on a camping stove brewed on the sidewalk when I was homeless. Fresh beans, coarse ground, perfect extraction method using fresh clean water. Very easy to do.
Nobody should be going to Starbucks.
Same guy who "super commutes" 1000 miles on a company jet, btw.
They used the same logic for pricing the game Peak but went in the opposite direction
