I’d just like to point out that OP is either lying or has been scammed.
Starbucks have consistent pricing and the most expensive sandwich in the UK is £5.10, technically 5.25 for a plant based breakfast item, see here for full menu prices.
But people like getting angry at cost of living issues right now (understandably) so this will get hundreds of upvotes despite being a lie.
Maybe more than in the UK, but here in a supermarket that would be 0.20€ of ham, 0.10€ of chese and 0.30€ of bread. Considering the volume starbucks has, I don’t think it’s unreasonable they would pay half of what you pay in a supermarket.
Of course these numbers I’m all taking our of my ass, but I think they are a close estimate. There’s a reason if Starbucks is so profitable
Still a stupid price for a crap sandwich. As I said in another reply, come to France and you will get the same thing for half the price. However, it will be nice (can you beat french bread? I think not)
I may live in France, but I am English too. A simple white cottage loaf is great, that is indisputable. However the availability is laughable.
When I lived in Portsmouth, there were 2 bakeries on the whole island. 2!! in my little town here we have 4 artisan bakers, plus 3 supermarkets that all sell really good bread. Just round the corner from my house there is a farm that sells bread (made completely in house) every Friday afternoon and people take the afternoon off work and drive 2 hours to buy it.
French bread wins hands down.
However I agree with you on one thing: I love bread!
Well that depends on the baguette. A cheap baguette moulée I agree. A nice tradition will be take around 72 hours to mature to the point it can successfully be used for violence.
My work’s cafeteria had sandwiches like that. Something like £5-6 a sandwich. People dont buy food in there now unless they’re desperate. Colleague bought chilli con carne in there the other week as he didnt have time to prepare his own food. It was like gravel
I’ve been to a Starbucks once in my life and that was in August of 2012. I have never been back since I never plan to go back. I absolutely do not understand the appeal.
It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.
Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :
“In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.”
Now I have to re-read snow crash. Such a great book.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
Same. Been to a few places in southeast Asia and Starbucks is pretty much the same everywhere there. So I can step off a street full of stalls selling all sorts of food items that I would class as “extremely adventurous” into a store with recognisable sweet/savoury cafe food options. I can relax in consistently dark-hued wood decor with a consistent assortment of tables/couches/chairs/charging points, and a consistent range of coffee drinks that each have enough calories to sustain a local family for a week.
You do know how prepackaged food works right? You buy it, they take it out of the package and heat it up or serve it to you… it’s behind the counter. You don’t get to pick one out and ask for it. Dumbass…
It’s not actually. That’s the second store they claim is the first. The real first was on Western. Coffee is the same though, you’re right, better to go to the roasterie
This I can actually weight in on a bit. They have their recipe under full version control and plant operations can only adjust it slightly without HQ doing an override. Not their air waste handling however, that is under local control.
My family ran a local sandwich shop for years. Here’s the problem.
If this is downtown, the local sandwich shop isn’t even there, in part because Starbucks helped price them out of being able to rent. Every supermarket now has a sandwich counter too, so local sandwich shops don’t do well in shopping centers either. Fast food has slightly improved their quality over the years so that’s more competitors at the low end. And Subway, period.
You’re paying for the convenience at Starbucks and in some cases convenience is valuable. If you don’t care about time and can go out of your way to a local sandwich shop, you get better food for less.
I was in an area like that once. It felt weird. Like I stepped into some alternative earth history where the franchises and chains all had different names. It was basically the same items for sale however.
Idk…local independent shops aren’t necessarily cheaper. There is a local coffee shop somewhat by me and it’s more expensive than Starbucks. Independent places don’t have the advantage of mass scale like the big name fast food and chain places do. When I go independent, I often find myself paying more money for less convenience. So it’s not even just convenience that you’re sacrificing
Yeah that can be true. Not all local businesses are competitively run.
While it’s true they don’t have the same economies of scale as large corporations, they also don’t have the same overhead. Starbucks coffee stands support a skyscraper full of bureaucrats somewhere. And Starbucks corporate has a stock price to worry about. Local shops don’t have all that crap, and can often get away with charging less. My dad just charged 15% below the corporate shop down the block, as a rule, and it was still profitable.
Nobody goes to Starbucks for good coffee, they go because it’s the same everywhere. Sometimes I want to go get a great coffee somewhere they know how to pull a decent shot, and sometimes I want brownish sugarmilk.
I went to Niagara falls the other day and they were selling $10 pizza slices, my wife got one. I went to the grocery store across the street, bought a large roll from the fresh baked ones. Got cheese ends and ham ends at the deli aisle, and grabbed salad cup. It cost me about $8 but I got a much better, massive sandwich compared to what my wife ate.
That’s a great idea and I would like to see it here, but America has no real laws preventing billions of dollars of food waste, so companies never do anything like this.
Tourist hot spots are insane. I was having a cup of coffee in a small cafe at St. Mark’s Square in Venice and it was 6.50€ for the coffee and a 12€ cover charge. Rip-off.
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