21 ms·

Well said. "Starbucks Craftsmanship"? Please. Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely l

Well said. "Starbucks Craftsmanship"? Please. Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee. I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbucks beverage. EDIT: I'm talking specifically about Starbacks. Australia has excellent coffee. I'm drinking a lovely Sprocket coffee as I write this.

tptacek 14y ago
Nobody should be selling "craftsmanship" for a dollar until they have at least 50 employees.
mistercow 14y ago
>and second rate beans Actually, the tragedy of it is that Starbucks uses pretty good beans. If you buy their brand of beans and make the coffee yourself, you can make a damned good cup of coffee. But Starbucks apparently has standardized entirely the wrong procedure for using those beans, so that the end product tastes like they accidentally dropped a bouillon cube in it.
- erickhill 14y ago
  While it is easy for some to slam Starbucks coffee for taste , the truth is nearly every cafe you go to will have a healthy business - and often perpetual lines - of paying customers. Quality is subjective, and the entire experience Starbucks brings is what the urban masses are looking for. For that matter, take a long road trip, and if you happen to see a Starbucks logo on an exit sign, more often than not you're going to throw in the towel and go get a Grande.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    I don't go on road trips without a significant supply of my concentrated aqueous solution of caffeine and theanine, and my handy concentrated flavoring so that I can make energy drinks on the go. So no, I wouldn't surrender to Starbucks in that scenario. But I realize that my habits are not exactly typical.
    - pirateking 14y ago
      Interested. Would you mind sharing your formula?
      - mistercow 14y ago
        Sure. You need a scale, but high precision isn't terribly important if you mix up large batches at once. A postal scale probably won't cut it though; you want at least as good as 100mg precision. You can get these ingredients from online retailers (except the orange extract — get that at a grocery store). I've used Hard Rhino Muscle and Pure Bulk and been satisfied with both. My caffeine/theanine formula: Caffeine - 1.6g L-theanine - 3.2g Water - 2 cups This makes for 100mg of caffeine per fluid ounce of solution, which makes measuring pretty easy. That is like a cup of coffee on the weak side of average, or 2-3 cups of tea. 200mg is like a strong cup of coffee. I have found that 100mg twice a day is close to the sweet spot where I get energy from it but don't build a tolerance. Obviously if you already have a tolerance, you'll want to use more. This mixture should be refrigerated to keep stuff from growing in it. Also, you can vary the concentration a little, but there is a limit at which the theanine solution will gel into an unusable colloidal mass. Hot water is useful for getting the ingredients to dissolve initially. The theanine is there for two reasons: 1) it smooths out the jitters from caffeine, and has a mood elevating effect when used with caffeine and 2) studies indicate that combined with caffeine, it has a number of cognitive benefits. 2:1 theanine to caffeine is around the ratio that evidence supports. My flavoring solution is: Citric acid - 30g Malic acid - 10g (optional) Sucralose - 1.5g Orange (or lemon) extract (83% alcohol) - 8g Water - 2 cups I put this in a squeeze bottle like the kind fast food places sometimes put vinegar and oil in, and it only takes a little squirt (about a teaspoon) to flavor a cup of water. I don't bother measuring this, as it's easy enough to do by taste. But do be careful not to make it too strong or the citric acid will hurt your mouth. Nothing dangerous, but it can make your gums sore. Malic acid is not strictly necessary. It adds a bit of fruitiness, but it's subtle. You can leave it out and use 35g of citric instead of 30g. Sucralose is the sweetener in Splenda, but it's important to remember that Splenda is highly diluted with fillers to make it the same sweetness as sugar. Pure sucralose is 600 times as sweet as sugar, so it must be measured with care. Hard Rhino is the only source I've found for it. Other sweeteners like xylitol, stevia extract, and erythritol are easier to find. Xylitol and erythritol are not sweeter than sugar, and I find stevia unpleasant. If you like stevia, it's actually more cost effective than sucralose; it's half as sweet, but it's cheaper. If you don't want to bother with the flavoring solution, you can also mix the caffeine with anything that is sweet and sour because those flavors mask the bitterness of the caffeine. Citrus is particularly effective. These are the most cost effective ways I've found to have tasty beverages and caffeine. The caffeine solution comes out to about 7 cents per reconstituted cup (18 cents for the equivalent of a Starbucks Grande). Most of that is actually the l-theanine; if you forgo that, it's only half a cent per cup. The flavoring comes out to under two cents per cup, or $0.30/gallon, but depends on how much you use. So basically, if I take this with me on a trip, I can have the same caffeine boost as a Grande, plus theanine to take away the jitters, for twenty-five cents. And as an added bonus, it's actually drinkable. Edit: One more thing. You can use volumetric measurements if you can find the bulk density for your powders, but I don't recommend it. The scale I have is an American Weigh DIA20, which costs about 20 bucks. The only thing I don't like about it is that its maximum capacity is 20g, but it's easy enough to measure the citric acid in two shots.
  - josephcooney 14y ago
    McDonalds does a roaring trade in burgers, but that doesn't mean their burgers are very good. I had starbucks coffee exactly once, and it was so bad that I vowed never to go back there again. The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk, or something like that. If the barista looks at you funny or hesitates in the slightest just go somewhere else.
    - jasonlotito 14y ago
      > The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk But I just want coffee flavored coffee.
dasil003 14y ago
I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress their garbage before you could throw yours in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there. Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies, so I can only imagine how terrible Starbucks is by comparison in your country.
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  Don't get me wrong, Aussies make amazing coffee. The best coffee comes from a portable stall outside Sydney central station crafted by a Polish Aussie using Campos beans.
- minikomi 14y ago
  Just for the record: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540480.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540480.stm
- Schwolop 14y ago
  I'm an Aussie coffee afficionado, and the best coffee I ever had in London was at Monmouth. No idea of the address, but it was about 5mins walk from the modern art museum, on that side of the Thames, near a food market. As if that'll help... :-)
  - Bro_Merch 14y ago
    I'm in the US and you have all really got me curious about the Aussie coffee. I too hate Starbucks and find it quite bitterly me a pot that's been on all day). Unfortunately I just prefer Big Coffees off the shelf brand, but don't know what to try. Just that it's not Starbucks. Is there somewhere that I can order Aussie coffee from and know its actually the coffee you describe and not just branded 'Aussie'?
    - brc 14y ago
      There's really no such thing as 'Aussie' coffee, as I doubt coffee is produced in commercial quantities anywhere in Australia, although there are local roasters. What they are referring to is coffee made by an Australia barista. Basically, coffee culture is huge in Australia, and being a quality barista is seen as a cool kind of job to have, despite the generally low pay. It's not unusual on a city street in Australia to have 5 or 6 coffee shops in a row. At this point, they are competing on coffee + barista quality. With this type of competition, the consumer gets well educated on the nuances between cups, and so it goes. I had no idea this idea of 'the aussie barista' was being exported to the world, but I guess it makes sense. In reality, what you're probably seeing is the competitive advantage given from a business cluster in Porter speak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster Ironically it grew out of Italian culture, mainly through immigrants to Australia. While my best coffee experience was still in Italy, generally I find coffee in other parts of the world appalling in comparison, esp in the USA.
mirsadm 14y ago
wow..sorry but that is completely incorrect. Melbourne has amazing coffee. I've been in Canada for over a year now (travelling to the US every now and then) and the general level of coffee here is truly awful (starbucks, tim hortons etc). The positive is that it is cheap.
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  Was talking about Starbucks not Australian coffee.
  - mirsadm 14y ago
    Ah makes sense. Starbucks is pretty terrible and I never really understood why you would go there (especially in Melbourne).
    - petitmiam 14y ago
      which is why, thankfully there are hardly any Starbucks left. Although I noticed one has just opened up on Elizabeth St. I guess they still attract tourists looking for something they know?
joshlehman 14y ago
I'd say feel free to replace "Starbucks" with any other purveyor of a product you enjoy at around this price point. When I say craftsmanship what I'm really referring to is the overall brand that Starbucks (or other coffee shops) have built. A brand that says "what you get here will meet your expectations".
- goostavos 14y ago
  I'm sorry you even had to come here and point that out to people.. Jesus Christ, man. After reading your article, I clicked HN hoping for some good discussion, after all, I too have always found the coffee analogy to be a poor one, but the bulk of the comments here are people pissing over the quality of beans and who was superior taste buds. For me, your first point sums up entirely my problem with the coffee argument -- and specifically why I spend $4 a day on coffee but rarely buy an app (though I wasn't like this initially). Even if I go to [insert coffee shop here (calm down HN)] and the coffee is a bit crappy, it still gets the job done. I won't be as happy that I spent the money on it, but at the end of the drink, I've got caffeine in my system. The state of the software in app stores, and lets be honest here, is a bit shit. There was a popular post the other day by some guy about not being able to make a living being an app developer, and it was all "boohoo"s.. until you look at what he's made. absolute crap. A concrete calculator that looks like an Intro to Android chapter one exercise? Boy, I wonder why he's not raking in the millions. Look at the top 100 right now. It the same 3 games over and over. My issue is that when I take a gamble on your app, and it turns out to be completely awful I don't get anything out of it at the end of the day, I'm simply out a dollar -- and no, that's not a large amount of money, but it is the principle. I feel robbed of that dollar because I got nothing in return for it. I travel for work constantly, when I first got my Android phone, I would browse through the Google Market before a flight, and then dump up to $5 on whatever game seemed interesting. I had an initial expectation of quality-- I thought up to $5 was perfectly reasonable. After, I'm going to (hopefully) get a couple of hours of enjoyment out of this app. However, I only did this handful of time before realizing that reading the SkyMall magazine is more interesting alternative to most apps. "Those of us in app development love to talk about how ridiculous it is that people will drop $4 every other day on a cup of coffee but will not “waste” 99 cents on our hot new app." For this to be an appropriate comparison, there would have to be a coffee shop that had the massive peaks and nulls like that of an app store. Imagine a coffee shop where getting a bad cup of coffee didn't simply mean, "of less than ideal quality given the price," and instead meant getting a black, undrinkable, coffee-ground-laden sludge that can only be thrown away after the first sip. I think people would be a little less inclined to spend money on their coffee. Only under these circumstances would I view getting a cup as holding the same "risk of waste" as buying a random app from the App store.
kscaldef 14y ago
You're missing the point in two ways a) "Starbucks" serves in this situation as a generic term for an espresso drink of your choice. Like Kleenex or Xerox or what-have-you. When someone says "people will spend $4 on a coffee at Starbucks without thinking about it" they don't mean at Starbucks specifically, they just mean "some coffee shop that isn't 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds". b) Even within the category of espresso-serving, $3ish coffee shops, the argument still applies. In a strange town (), in the absence of other reliable information, I will probably go to Starbucks because I know that I'll get a somewhat over-roasted, but drinkable, latte. If I walk into a random independent coffee shop, there's some chance I'll get an excellent cup of coffee. But, experience has also taught me that it's more likely that I'll get something that's no better, or frequently worse, than Starbucks. Similarly, if I'm out of saline or need some allergy medicine while traveling, I'm likely to grab it at Walmart, because all their stores are laid out the same and I can find what I need blindfolded. There is value in predictability in many situations. () caveat that this applies to travel in the US, and generally for work. In various European countries, I'd bet on the random local shop. And if I'm traveling on vacation, there's value in experiencing something new and local. But, if I just want my morning coffee on the way in to the office, easy and predicable wins.
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  It's hard for me to relate to your experience of Starbucks in the US. But in Australia the quality of a Starbucks coffee is inconsistent and typically bad. Australia has a relatively old coffee culture, so most coffee drinkers are discerning. In the absence of reliable information in a strange town I will always gamble on a the small cafe, as they have to work to get customers as opposed to depend on an advertising budget and novelty style sugary drinks.
  - drcongo 14y ago
    Starbucks coffee in the US is just as bad as Starbucks coffee is in Aus, possibly even worse because US customers seem to have much lower standards for coffee. Last time I had to drink Starbucks in the US I had to get 5 shots in a latte so that I could actually taste the coffee.

tptacek 14y ago

Nobody should be selling "craftsmanship" for a dollar until they have at least 50 employees.

mistercow 14y ago

>and second rate beans Actually, the tragedy of it is that Starbucks uses pretty good beans. If you buy their brand of beans and make the coffee yourself, you can make a damned good cup of coffee. But Starbucks apparently has standardized entirely the wrong procedure for using those beans, so that the end product tastes like they accidentally dropped a bouillon cube in it.

erickhill 14y ago
While it is easy for some to slam Starbucks coffee for taste , the truth is nearly every cafe you go to will have a healthy business - and often perpetual lines - of paying customers. Quality is subjective, and the entire experience Starbucks brings is what the urban masses are looking for. For that matter, take a long road trip, and if you happen to see a Starbucks logo on an exit sign, more often than not you're going to throw in the towel and go get a Grande.
- mistercow 14y ago
  I don't go on road trips without a significant supply of my concentrated aqueous solution of caffeine and theanine, and my handy concentrated flavoring so that I can make energy drinks on the go. So no, I wouldn't surrender to Starbucks in that scenario. But I realize that my habits are not exactly typical.
  - pirateking 14y ago
    Interested. Would you mind sharing your formula?
    - mistercow 14y ago
      Sure. You need a scale, but high precision isn't terribly important if you mix up large batches at once. A postal scale probably won't cut it though; you want at least as good as 100mg precision. You can get these ingredients from online retailers (except the orange extract — get that at a grocery store). I've used Hard Rhino Muscle and Pure Bulk and been satisfied with both. My caffeine/theanine formula: Caffeine - 1.6g L-theanine - 3.2g Water - 2 cups This makes for 100mg of caffeine per fluid ounce of solution, which makes measuring pretty easy. That is like a cup of coffee on the weak side of average, or 2-3 cups of tea. 200mg is like a strong cup of coffee. I have found that 100mg twice a day is close to the sweet spot where I get energy from it but don't build a tolerance. Obviously if you already have a tolerance, you'll want to use more. This mixture should be refrigerated to keep stuff from growing in it. Also, you can vary the concentration a little, but there is a limit at which the theanine solution will gel into an unusable colloidal mass. Hot water is useful for getting the ingredients to dissolve initially. The theanine is there for two reasons: 1) it smooths out the jitters from caffeine, and has a mood elevating effect when used with caffeine and 2) studies indicate that combined with caffeine, it has a number of cognitive benefits. 2:1 theanine to caffeine is around the ratio that evidence supports. My flavoring solution is: Citric acid - 30g Malic acid - 10g (optional) Sucralose - 1.5g Orange (or lemon) extract (83% alcohol) - 8g Water - 2 cups I put this in a squeeze bottle like the kind fast food places sometimes put vinegar and oil in, and it only takes a little squirt (about a teaspoon) to flavor a cup of water. I don't bother measuring this, as it's easy enough to do by taste. But do be careful not to make it too strong or the citric acid will hurt your mouth. Nothing dangerous, but it can make your gums sore. Malic acid is not strictly necessary. It adds a bit of fruitiness, but it's subtle. You can leave it out and use 35g of citric instead of 30g. Sucralose is the sweetener in Splenda, but it's important to remember that Splenda is highly diluted with fillers to make it the same sweetness as sugar. Pure sucralose is 600 times as sweet as sugar, so it must be measured with care. Hard Rhino is the only source I've found for it. Other sweeteners like xylitol, stevia extract, and erythritol are easier to find. Xylitol and erythritol are not sweeter than sugar, and I find stevia unpleasant. If you like stevia, it's actually more cost effective than sucralose; it's half as sweet, but it's cheaper. If you don't want to bother with the flavoring solution, you can also mix the caffeine with anything that is sweet and sour because those flavors mask the bitterness of the caffeine. Citrus is particularly effective. These are the most cost effective ways I've found to have tasty beverages and caffeine. The caffeine solution comes out to about 7 cents per reconstituted cup (18 cents for the equivalent of a Starbucks Grande). Most of that is actually the l-theanine; if you forgo that, it's only half a cent per cup. The flavoring comes out to under two cents per cup, or $0.30/gallon, but depends on how much you use. So basically, if I take this with me on a trip, I can have the same caffeine boost as a Grande, plus theanine to take away the jitters, for twenty-five cents. And as an added bonus, it's actually drinkable. Edit: One more thing. You can use volumetric measurements if you can find the bulk density for your powders, but I don't recommend it. The scale I have is an American Weigh DIA20, which costs about 20 bucks. The only thing I don't like about it is that its maximum capacity is 20g, but it's easy enough to measure the citric acid in two shots.
- josephcooney 14y ago
  McDonalds does a roaring trade in burgers, but that doesn't mean their burgers are very good. I had starbucks coffee exactly once, and it was so bad that I vowed never to go back there again. The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk, or something like that. If the barista looks at you funny or hesitates in the slightest just go somewhere else.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    > The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk But I just want coffee flavored coffee.

dasil003 14y ago

I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress their garbage before you could throw yours in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there. Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies, so I can only imagine how terrible Starbucks is by comparison in your country.

andrewfelix 14y ago
Don't get me wrong, Aussies make amazing coffee. The best coffee comes from a portable stall outside Sydney central station crafted by a Polish Aussie using Campos beans.
minikomi 14y ago
Just for the record: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540480.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540480.stm
Schwolop 14y ago
I'm an Aussie coffee afficionado, and the best coffee I ever had in London was at Monmouth. No idea of the address, but it was about 5mins walk from the modern art museum, on that side of the Thames, near a food market. As if that'll help... :-)
- Bro_Merch 14y ago
  I'm in the US and you have all really got me curious about the Aussie coffee. I too hate Starbucks and find it quite bitterly me a pot that's been on all day). Unfortunately I just prefer Big Coffees off the shelf brand, but don't know what to try. Just that it's not Starbucks. Is there somewhere that I can order Aussie coffee from and know its actually the coffee you describe and not just branded 'Aussie'?
  - brc 14y ago
    There's really no such thing as 'Aussie' coffee, as I doubt coffee is produced in commercial quantities anywhere in Australia, although there are local roasters. What they are referring to is coffee made by an Australia barista. Basically, coffee culture is huge in Australia, and being a quality barista is seen as a cool kind of job to have, despite the generally low pay. It's not unusual on a city street in Australia to have 5 or 6 coffee shops in a row. At this point, they are competing on coffee + barista quality. With this type of competition, the consumer gets well educated on the nuances between cups, and so it goes. I had no idea this idea of 'the aussie barista' was being exported to the world, but I guess it makes sense. In reality, what you're probably seeing is the competitive advantage given from a business cluster in Porter speak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster Ironically it grew out of Italian culture, mainly through immigrants to Australia. While my best coffee experience was still in Italy, generally I find coffee in other parts of the world appalling in comparison, esp in the USA.

mirsadm 14y ago

wow..sorry but that is completely incorrect. Melbourne has amazing coffee. I've been in Canada for over a year now (travelling to the US every now and then) and the general level of coffee here is truly awful (starbucks, tim hortons etc). The positive is that it is cheap.

andrewfelix 14y ago
Was talking about Starbucks not Australian coffee.
- mirsadm 14y ago
  Ah makes sense. Starbucks is pretty terrible and I never really understood why you would go there (especially in Melbourne).
  - petitmiam 14y ago
    which is why, thankfully there are hardly any Starbucks left. Although I noticed one has just opened up on Elizabeth St. I guess they still attract tourists looking for something they know?

joshlehman 14y ago

I'd say feel free to replace "Starbucks" with any other purveyor of a product you enjoy at around this price point. When I say craftsmanship what I'm really referring to is the overall brand that Starbucks (or other coffee shops) have built. A brand that says "what you get here will meet your expectations".

goostavos 14y ago
I'm sorry you even had to come here and point that out to people.. Jesus Christ, man. After reading your article, I clicked HN hoping for some good discussion, after all, I too have always found the coffee analogy to be a poor one, but the bulk of the comments here are people pissing over the quality of beans and who was superior taste buds. For me, your first point sums up entirely my problem with the coffee argument -- and specifically why I spend $4 a day on coffee but rarely buy an app (though I wasn't like this initially). Even if I go to [insert coffee shop here (calm down HN)] and the coffee is a bit crappy, it still gets the job done. I won't be as happy that I spent the money on it, but at the end of the drink, I've got caffeine in my system. The state of the software in app stores, and lets be honest here, is a bit shit. There was a popular post the other day by some guy about not being able to make a living being an app developer, and it was all "boohoo"s.. until you look at what he's made. absolute crap. A concrete calculator that looks like an Intro to Android chapter one exercise? Boy, I wonder why he's not raking in the millions. Look at the top 100 right now. It the same 3 games over and over. My issue is that when I take a gamble on your app, and it turns out to be completely awful I don't get anything out of it at the end of the day, I'm simply out a dollar -- and no, that's not a large amount of money, but it is the principle. I feel robbed of that dollar because I got nothing in return for it. I travel for work constantly, when I first got my Android phone, I would browse through the Google Market before a flight, and then dump up to $5 on whatever game seemed interesting. I had an initial expectation of quality-- I thought up to $5 was perfectly reasonable. After, I'm going to (hopefully) get a couple of hours of enjoyment out of this app. However, I only did this handful of time before realizing that reading the SkyMall magazine is more interesting alternative to most apps. "Those of us in app development love to talk about how ridiculous it is that people will drop $4 every other day on a cup of coffee but will not “waste” 99 cents on our hot new app." For this to be an appropriate comparison, there would have to be a coffee shop that had the massive peaks and nulls like that of an app store. Imagine a coffee shop where getting a bad cup of coffee didn't simply mean, "of less than ideal quality given the price," and instead meant getting a black, undrinkable, coffee-ground-laden sludge that can only be thrown away after the first sip. I think people would be a little less inclined to spend money on their coffee. Only under these circumstances would I view getting a cup as holding the same "risk of waste" as buying a random app from the App store.

kscaldef 14y ago

You're missing the point in two ways a) "Starbucks" serves in this situation as a generic term for an espresso drink of your choice. Like Kleenex or Xerox or what-have-you. When someone says "people will spend $4 on a coffee at Starbucks without thinking about it" they don't mean at Starbucks specifically, they just mean "some coffee shop that isn't 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds". b) Even within the category of espresso-serving, $3ish coffee shops, the argument still applies. In a strange town (), in the absence of other reliable information, I will probably go to Starbucks because I know that I'll get a somewhat over-roasted, but drinkable, latte. If I walk into a random independent coffee shop, there's some chance I'll get an excellent cup of coffee. But, experience has also taught me that it's more likely that I'll get something that's no better, or frequently worse, than Starbucks. Similarly, if I'm out of saline or need some allergy medicine while traveling, I'm likely to grab it at Walmart, because all their stores are laid out the same and I can find what I need blindfolded. There is value in predictability in many situations. () caveat that this applies to travel in the US, and generally for work. In various European countries, I'd bet on the random local shop. And if I'm traveling on vacation, there's value in experiencing something new and local. But, if I just want my morning coffee on the way in to the office, easy and predicable wins.

andrewfelix 14y ago
It's hard for me to relate to your experience of Starbucks in the US. But in Australia the quality of a Starbucks coffee is inconsistent and typically bad. Australia has a relatively old coffee culture, so most coffee drinkers are discerning. In the absence of reliable information in a strange town I will always gamble on a the small cafe, as they have to work to get customers as opposed to depend on an advertising budget and novelty style sugary drinks.
- drcongo 14y ago
  Starbucks coffee in the US is just as bad as Starbucks coffee is in Aus, possibly even worse because US customers seem to have much lower standards for coffee. Last time I had to drink Starbucks in the US I had to get 5 shots in a latte so that I could actually taste the coffee.