[Cd00d]

I'm taking (off topic) issue with the notion that Starbucks is not particularly high quality. Before Starbucks the options for coffee were almost universally limited to weak or burnt and stale bland Columbian beans. Starbucks is excellent at consistency (that was in the manual actually; I worked as a Starbucks barista for a year after college), to the extent that they replaced their skilled/training-required espresso machines with push button devices, but that does not diminish the overall more-than-acceptable quality.

[ctchocula]

Starbucks may be consistent at making coffee, but coffee elitists would claim that their coffee beans are over-roasted in order to hide the generally poor quality of the beans and used to burn out a lot of the flavors. If you buy a bag of coffee beans of freshly roasted coffee beans from a local coffee shop, and a bag from Starbucks, then make yourself a cup of coffee the difference is enormous. The predominant taste of the Starbucks coffee is bitterness, but the local coffee will taste fragrant.

Starbucks is much better than the average Folgers-type diner coffee (in that it's not both totally burnt and weak), which was the previous point of comparison for most Americans. At best, a cup of Starbucks is merely strong. However, it's not remotely as good as something from a coffeeshop which tailors the whole process to highlight the quality of the ingredients and attention to detail in the process.

Of course, I perhaps do not appreciate the challenges of managing a global supply chain and making it scale to the size of Starbucks, but I would agree with gp's assertion their coffee is not particularly high quality.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-cof...

[Boothroid]

Agreed. I don't have a sophisticated palate and even I can tell that Starbucks is inferior to competitors.

[myaso]

Agreed again. Starbucks coffee being over roasted is a common complaint, also I find the atmosphere unappealing usually. Most coffee shops I frequent have to hit the sweet spot of having decent coffee + price and being a pleasant place to work while having access to reliable wifi -- for me that turned out to be the local supermarket, I get real ambient noise as well without having music being blasted over speakers all the time. The trick I found is to look for places where people want to hold conversations in public; I often see Arab immigrants gathering to converse, local meetings proceeding, retirees conversing, and people conducting business at this location -- the defining feature is that nobody is really under the age of 30-35 usually if they use the venue for social functions. It changes from city to city, sometimes it's a local hipster cafe or a random 24h chain where interesting things happen outside the purview of what is mainstream.