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.
People giving money to Starbucks only tells them they can continue to charge what they want. I’ve never been a customer because coffee gives me the shits, but I’m constantly amazed to hear what people are willing to pay for a single beverage. Most Starbucks drinkers pay what I would pay for an entire meal drink included for their one drink.
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.
I get the sentiment, but most places don’t have even halfway decent coffee shops. Everyone gives starbucks shit (rightfully so), but the fact is if you walk into a random cafe in America, it will most likely be inferior to starbucks. The level of quality in American coffee is just abysmal. And if you’re traveling, you won’t know if the cafe you take a chance on is a hidden gem (spoiler, it never is). I was in Austin one time and I found this hipster place that had great reviews on google. The interior was really nice, nice place to work, spacious, etc. The coffee tasted like dog water. It wasn’t mediocre, it was trash. I’m sure Austin has great cafes, but unless you live there how will you know? Starbucks is a consistent mediocre coffee.
Reviews are a bit of a shit show with everyone being used to Starbucks as the “standard” now. I still give the local places a shot when I travel. I find them rarely worse than Starbucks for a latte and quiet often better. Plus, you know not giving money to Starbucks and their horrible anti-union leadership…
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