It’s sad to think there are people in the world that think Starbucks coffee is nice.
did not know sugar got that expensive
Look at the wording- ‘premium experience’. He’s not selling coffee, he’s thinking big picture of the whole experience from the moment you walk in the store. He’s not even wrong here. This is good business management- that he’s taking charge of everything about the store from the decor, the furniture, the colors, how the employee talks to you, etc. That’s all part of the experience.
What’s wrong is that people keep going. Most people don’t give a fuck about the experience, they just want a tasty coffee. Our economy is based on competition and free choice. If he makes his coffee cost $8 or $9 or $15 or $50 that’s his right and his company’s right. Just as it is your right to go elsewhere, which you should be doing anyway.
The thing is- IMHO, Starbucks coffee isn’t worth anywhere near $9. Here’s a challenge- go to Starbucks and order a double espresso shot. Now find a local artisan coffee place, like the type with a chalkboard that says where the beans they’re brewing today were grown. And get a double espresso from them also. Compare the two.
What you’ll notice about Starbucks is that it’s burnt. And that’s because it’s literally burnt- the typical Starbucks bean is roasted MUCH darker than average, so the resulting coffee flavor is dominated by a burned smoky bitter-ish flavor.
Compare that to your local artisan coffee place- you’ll notice it’s NOT burnt, the flavor is NOT dominated by smokiness, but you have a lot more layers of flavor. Then order whatever drink you want- better coffee in means better drink out.Keep in mind also most of what Starbucks sells isn’t really coffee, it’s milky sugary drinks that incorporate a few drips of espresso. So you’re paying $9 for a sugary calorie bomb made from overly roasted coffee that just makes you fat.
Also- if you usually order the same thing at Starbucks- just learn to make it. Even if you throw $1000 at a nice fully automatic espresso machine, taking the per-coffee cost from $9 to $1 means you’ll break even on the machine in 125 coffees. For most people that’s less than a year. And you can do it yourself- next time you order, watch what the barista does. They are not wizards and nothing behind the counter is magic. An espresso machine and a blender will make like 95% of the menu. Here’s a guide
Even on a shoestring budget you can get far. My equipment:
10 euro ‘grinder’ 30 euro moka pot (bialetti) Decent beans (segafredo, lavazza) about 10 euro per kilo (on offer), lasts my family about a month.
I like late macchiato, which in my case is about 2 thirds milk heated in the micro, 1 third coffee.
I know the above will horrify real coffee enthusiasts, but I can tell you it’s a lot better than starbucks, and a lot cheaper too.
If you have decent coffee, you get the grind dialed in, and a half decent sub 300€ expresso machine, you can get very very good coffee.
I have owned a small resto in Spain, so I kind of know a bit about expresso.
The coffee experience is 100% subjective, anyway.
Some like light roasts, dark, some Arabica, some robusta, some espresso, pour over, some percolated (I just barfed a little in my mouth here).
There is a lot of bullshit being peddled by coffee influencers who every week have to make a video about the same subject to keep making money, anyway.
I have friends who are super into roasting their own beans and curated coffee experiences…
Starbucks is far and away from being premium or even…good. They’re all marketing and accessibility, not quality.
or go to any other coffee store. phillz, peets(maybe), theres some that are specific to our city that also seells the product to stores. of course make your own, french press or carefe.
Starbucks is not coffee, its a sugary mess with some coffee involved somewhere
Labeling Starbucks coffee as a premium experience is a bold statement. Did he never drank real coffee? “Oh but it’s premium because our coffee tastes so bad, we just add a lot of sugar and flavors to it so you won’t notice.”
I would actually pay $9 for the premium experience of seeing this CEO getting a cup of boiling hot coffee in his face.
probably not, hes probably like mcdonald ceo, he likes this “product”
Who goes to Starbucks anyway? That place would not know what a coffee bean looked like if it rained beans. I’m lucky to live in a place where there are the most coffee shops in the world; over 9000 independent coffee shops with some amazing beans.
Shanghai?
Indeed.
I don’t give a fuck how much they charge for coffee. I don’t know why anyone would. You buy it, or you don’t. It’s not fucking insulin. No one needs to buy their shitty products.
The only reason I would care is to compare it to how much the baristas are getting paid. How many cups of coffee can a barista afford from a single shift, purely from wages? Can a barista even afford a single cup of coffee per hour with their hourly wage? And no, don’t start with the “but it’s a tipped position” stuff. How much does the company pay the barista?
I use this comparison because the McDonalds in my area starts pay at ~$10 per hour before tax, while a Big Mac Meal (arguably the most iconic and popular item on the menu) costs $11.25 before tax. In an eight hour shift, after taxes are factored in, the McDonalds worker can barely afford to buy five meals from the place they’re working at. But how many meals does that worker prepare and serve in a single eight hour shift? Definitely more than five. Probably by several orders of magnitude. So how much profit has the worker brought in, compared to how little they were paid?
To bring it back to the original point, how many $9 drinks does a barista prepare in a single shift? How much profit is made per drink? And how many can the barista afford? This is a video of a man who infamously “commutes” to work across the country via a private company jet, because he refuses to move closer to where their corporate HQ is located. How much company profit does this man consume, simply by traveling to and from work? How much profit from $9 cups of coffee could have gone towards higher barista pay, instead of paying for this man’s commute?
starbucks has a tendancy to shut down coffee shops if they even hear a word of unionization being mentioned. i noticed like 2 of them near my work that were suddenly closed not coincidentally when unionization in another state was being mentioned. and this was a starbucks that was in a pretty high traffic area, tech conferences center is nearby , i always see it packed.
This is really all that needs to be said. Nobody needs Starbucks coffee, so either pay the price or don’t go.
Prioritizing “experience” over coffee itself is not new for Starbucks. Even before the $9 price tag, their prices far exceeded their (low quality) coffee because they’re selling the experience.
Coffee roasters sometimes refer to them as “Charbucks.”
They know climate change is about to destroy the coffee industry so they’re getting ready to pivot
I had a Starbucks franchise owner tell me that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; [they] sell an experience.
Then improve the experience, I told him. I seriously have no idea how they’re still around.
Starbucks doesn’t franchise FYI. They have places that sell coffee “Proudly Serve Starbucks Coffee” as well as licensed stores, but those are typically mega corps like Safeway, Target and HMS host.
https://www.tastingtable.com/1633136/we-proudly-serve-starbucks-explained/
Oh, interesting! I didn’t know that!
End of the day it is on us to actually use the tools of haters and trolls to fight back against any of this stuff. But we police ourselves. They trained us to police ourselves away from the tools.
We created the internet. We learned we can use it to shape culture and push back against these rich interests but they also learned it at the same time. So they covertly used bot accounts to push us away from ways to shape our world and instead trained us to use this stuff to post about beans and “its morbing time”
Income cohort…
Fuck Starbucks. It’s not the first time I mention this, and I’ll keep mentioning it: When Corona hit Germany, the government reduced the VAT to prevent restaurants from going bankrupt in 2020. Starbucks gave every customer the finger and did not lower the prices, keeping the difference for themselves. I was never a regular customer but this made me blacklist them for life.
Pepperidge Farm remembers
Prime example of: “capitalism breeds innovation”
The petrol stations are currently doing the same.
My country reduced European VAT tax on coffee and nearly every coffee shop kept the prices at the same level. The government raised them back again later. I’d say this is not starbucks-specific, reducing VAT to lower the prices just doesn’t work.
Pfeffergrat erinnert?
I’m surprised he didn’t mention the “sense of pride and accomplishment” buying a $9 coffee would bring -_-
Has this man even been inside a Starbucks recently? They used to be loungy places people could chill, now they’re all bland, sparsely decorated, dirty, and uninviting. There is absolutely nothing premium about Starbucks, it’s basically a fast-food chain. Once again demonstrating how far removed CEOs are from reality
Look at the clip without sound. It’s like a rubber doll, no emotions what so ever.
They should have sent the manager and crew to the thrift store with a corporate CC and a box truck for furniture. Instead it’s bland, depressed, “I can’t believe it’s not cardboard™.”
Fast food is expensive too. And it’s hurting their sales, and they can’t figure out that they need to slice profits, not the product.
The profit is the product
Burger King is just inedible now. And by that I mean twice now I’ve eaten there, and then within an hour my stomach upset. Then followed by 12 hours of what can only be described as “VIOLENT DIARRHEA”. Yes, all caps, because thats the urgancy that situation called for.
Two different locations too. Plus the first time I went with a friend, and she got it too. The first time I chalked it off to being that particular location. Then, nearly 8 months later, different location, different city. Same result.
After that, Burger King is officially just as banned from my diet as taco bell is. Inedible.
Chipotle is still the king of food poisoning. They have a proven track record in toilet-related war crimes going back many years. Guess I’m adding BK to my no-go list now too.
Whereas I’ve never had food poisoning in the 10ish times I’ve eaten at Chipotle, Cici’s pizza is 3 for 3 for violence out both ends for me. The third time I was practically fooled into it, but I’d rather just starve next time (there won’t be one).
Inedible Now? Your same experience was mine over 15 years ago. I was getting stomach pains and shitting really bad every single time I had BK. He’ll even towards the end I couldn’t even swallow a fry. I had started switching to onion rings cause the fries left a wax taste in my mouth after.
I haven’t had BK since then. 2010 ish. I ended up dropping all fast food after Covid cause the prices just don’t match up with quality anymore.
I heard a single combo meal at McDonalds clocks in near $20 these days. Fuck that noise. Not for a thin, dry “meat” patty that gets microwaved and then thrown between a pair of bread slices. No sir. No thanks. I rather spend that $20 on take out from a real restaurant.
Hey buddy, those yachts aren’t gonna buy themselves. What do you expect them to do, live on less?
It doesn’t help when a good chunk of their customer base still goes on a regular basis. I often see long lines at drive thrus in my area despite combos costing $10+.
When I want to lounge at a café, I’m expecting a warm, inviting interior, some plants, bookish decor, smooth jazz, hip staff, and a coffee that could only be produced by coffee geeks with attention to detail at every step of the process…
You walk into a starbucks today, everything is cold and industrial, they’ve got pop music blaring on the radio, and the staff all look miserable. Oh, and the coffee sucks.
Came here to say this. What ‘premium’ experience is he talking about?
Something tells me that the only Starbucks he actually has used recently is likely a very high-end version for the C titles in HQ, meters away from his office and for employee use only.
They’re calling it an experience becuase consumers are indicating they are willing to pay for experiences while pulling back spending on daily expenses.
Consumers mean concerts and vacations and this douche knows he isn’t actually offering an experience so he does the mind trick where he says the term over and over to associate in the consumers mind the idea that drive thru coffee is an experience.
Absolutely. It was a clear attempt at adding ‘perceived value’ by using the word ‘experience’ so many times. He knows what type of consumer he’s speaking to.
These interviews are really just PR opportunities for guys like this (in their perception).
The interviewer should have pushed back and asked what made it premium.
He’s talking about the Starbucks experience he has. Headquarters will always be the perfect Starbucks, and if he goes to a real shop, it’ll be a newly opened one with a new special item. He doesn’t go to the actual shops people probably associate with Starbucks.
The ones in asia are well decorated. People go there to take video calls.
I remember 90’s era Starbucks and a bunch were still pretty grungy corners of strip malls. But the point was they were still coffeeshops, despite being a chain that went corporate.
Now they’re glorified coffee stands with real estate baggage and little sandwiches. And zero of that ‘third place’ shit they used to dominate the market.
I’m happy to drink a $2 coffee from the gas station (probably a half gallon of it 🙂) and set the remaining $7 aside. Then again, I only get drip coffee and not any of the milkshake-y stuff Starbucks specializes in.
Calling the stuff you buy at Starbucks coffee? What they sell is all sorts of sugar in a cup. This is not a coffee place, it is a diabetes hole.
you are allowed to get a black coffee
The most over roasted slop around, sure. There’s a reason why that place serves pure diabetes, their black coffee is kinda gross.
maybe the coffee is gross so that it can pair with the diabetes. That much sugar needs a very strong flavor to offset it.
Or Starbucks just uses the absolute cheapest beans on the market and then burns them for that truly consistent char flavor, which they then have to turn into diabetes to make palatable.
Either way, it’s just not good.
No one does that though, because Starbucks coffee is terrible. It’s over-roasted charcoal crap. If you order a black coffee, do yourself a favour and get a nice, light-roasted pour over from an independent cafe serving locally roasted, single-origin coffee. Good coffee should smell like a mix of dried fruit, floral perfume, and toasted nuts, not burnt rubber.
Listen man, I get it, you don’t like dark roasts but you don’t have to yuck other peoples yums. Could they get a better one than at Starbucks? Sure. Is there anything wrong with a nice dark roast? No.
That wasn’t about dark roasts, that was about Starbucks’ coffee and roast. There’s a big difference. Starbucks goes darker than most specialty roasters’ dark roasts.
Also, “burnt rubber” notes often come from robusta coffee. Robusta is cheap, easy to grow, and has a long shelf life. The darker it’s roasted, the less it tastes like burnt rubber[1]. But Starbucks claims that they use 100% arabica. If true, then it’s almost impressive that they made it taste like that.
There are some amazing, exceptional robustas, but you won’t find them in commodity coffee or Starbucks ↩︎
They do have light and medium roasts, too. I’m not saying their coffee is great, but it’s not all burnt either.
I buy dark roasts from a local coffee roaster in my city. They don’t have any fruit or floral notes, but they taste like dark chocolate, not burnt rubber. They’re good dark roasts. Starbucks is still crap. It only tastes good in a giant cup of milk and sugar and caramel sauce.
If you pay 9$ for that it will just make you sad. Let them pour some sugar milk foam in it so at least you don’t know that you are drinking burnt mediocre coffee.
I don’t know, mediocre is a stretch.
