[bigiain]

Starbucks aren't trying to "beat" specialty espresso places. They aren't even in competition with them really.

https://www.fastcompany.com/887990/starbucks-third-place-and...

"Starbucks goal is to become the Third Place in our daily lives. (i.e. Home, Work and Starbucks) “We want to provide all the comforts of your home and office. You can sit in a nice chair, talk on your phone, look out the window, surf the web… oh, and drink coffee too,” said Kelly. (Notice she put “drink coffee” last???)"

A friend of mine was high up in marketing at Starbucks in NY ~15-20 years ago, and her explanation to me back then was "What we supply to people is a comfortable and familiar place to sit and meet up with people. 'Coffee' is just the way we take money off people for that." This was an extremely valuable thing in NY specifically, where lots of even otherwise "wealthy" people lived in small and/or shared places - where inviting people into their homes socially or for small/contracting type business was way less attractive than meeting people at Starbucks, and a welcoming and familiar place to sit for an hour or two with your laptop or notepad is a really nice break from your tiny little NY apartment. "Better coffee" does not make that more valuable. Ubiquity and standardisation makes that more valuable. The coffee only needs to be "good enough" that people wont choose other, less familiar and potentially less welcoming feeling places to do an hour or two's work or meet up with people.

[strogonoff]

Spot on. Starbucks in any country feels radically differently designed compared to a local cafe, where you feel the pressure to drink your cup promptly and rotate out (how intensely you feel that pressure depends on the owner and your own perceptiveness).

This also means in places where quality local coffeeshops start to become alternatives for “hangout spaces”, Starbucks may offer more intricate coffee options and reluctantly compete on that front. However, that’s rare.

Some of the true equivalents are chain coffeeshops of South Korea. They serve equivalently average-to-bad coffee.

Of note, during recent lockdown measures in Seoul, these franchised coffeeshops (including Starbucks) were singled out among all food and drink establishments as the only ones forbidden from letting customers sit in at all. I suspect it’s because they are effectively the “third place” for many people, so the government considered them a major vector.

Some branches more or less shut down as a result, since take-outs are just not worth it with that quality of coffee.

[sfifs]

While this IS true, i also find in my part of the world that the brewed coffee and beans from Starbucks is significantly and consistently superior to most things i am able to conveniently find.

Now I've been to SF and Peet's was excellent and there are similarly excellent coffee shops in many city centers. But where i live and work, Starbucks tends to be pretty much a cut above much else conveniently available

[bigiain]

Oh sure. "Good enough". Because "most things" are crap. But you're prioritising "conveniently find" way over "coffee quality". I'll go an hour out of my way to find great coffee. Even when I travel I'll spend significant time researching the best coffee in the places I'm going.

If you're not plugged into the specialty coffee world, you'll think places like Peets are "excellent". Next time you go to SF, try Ritual and Blue Bottle and Sightglass (and my last visit there was 5-ish years back, so I'm certainly out of date with newer recommendations, and I seem to recall Blue Bottle "sold out" and may not be genuinely specialty grade coffee any more...)

25-30% of my rss feed is coffee-related, probably 20% of my Youtube subscriptions are coffee-related. The far end of the excellent coffee bell curve isn't _that_ hard to find, but here in Sydney, for example, many of the top 10-20 places are good enough that they're coffee destinations in their own right, and are not paying for high foot traffic locations in city centers. I've got four great roasters fairly nearby, all pretty much in the middle of light industrial hell. They're in between nondescript warehouses and bearing shops and panel beaters and down the street from new loft conversions selling the "hipster scene" they've partly created (along with the breweries and live music venue and motorcycle workshops nearby). People get in their cars or get a cab/Uber to go there because Hazel and Claire roast there, or because Dan is the head barista, or because Sasa trains everyone personally, or because Reuben sources all the green beans himself.

Go find _those_ places in your city, then tell us what you think of Peets and Starbucks... And maybe you won't care. Not eveybody does, and that's fine. Maybe it'll ruin you for life, and you'll never be able to drink mediocre coffee again - and you might think that's wonderful of you might hate me for it... But go find out...

[musicale]

Blue Bottle is majority owned by Nestle and seems OK but not particularly special.

[bigiain]

That's sad. I hope some people got rich selling to Nestle - that place was _amazing_ 20 years ago.

[boneitis]

They're not just "OK." Their coffee is phenomenal today (although I can't speak to relativity from its 20 years' past self).

They have absolutely EXPLODED in number of locations in CA since acquisition though, so they're not really my first search if I'm in the center of a Metropolis.

[musicale]

> Now I've been to SF and Peet's was excellent

http://www.daleisphere.com/the-intertwined-history-of-peets-...

"To this day Peet’s remains a largely a regional player though it has expanded to a few other U.S. states. It still makes the best chain-store coffee I’ve ever had – far surpassing the coffee made available at Starbucks"

This seems like something of an exaggeration. Peet's seems marginally better than Starbucks. Maybe.

[tikwidd]

Putting aside the shared space aspect, I would argue that Starbucks does not really even trade primarily in coffee, but milk drinks. Starbucks is a "milk bar" (and lots of other local coffee shops could be described in the same way).

[obayesshelton]

This is a great response, you also have to think that Starbucks are "convenient" when you cannot get the specialty espresso places. For example on my way home to see family I pass about four drive through Starbucks.