[bigiain]

> Reality : Starbucks does not care about coffee quality

Perhaps even deeper. Starbucks knows it's customers do not care much about coffee quality.

Similar to Apple. Apple know it's customers don't care much about being able to pick and choose the graphics cards or ram modules in their computers, and they don't care much about removable batteries or microSD cards or headphone jacks on their phones. iPhones have "good enough" battery life/internal storage/headphone options, and Apple are totally happy to walk away from the small demographic of potential customers for who those things are showstoppers.

I am not a Starbucks customer. I know by first name the people who roasted the beans for pretty much all the coffee I've drunk in the last decade or more. I have 5-6 local roaster I buy from and I almost totally avoid cafes that aren't theirs (or who buy beans from one of them). My most regular "cafe" sells no food at all (Coffee Alchemy in Marrickville, for any Sydneysiders...) - only espresso based and pourover brewed coffee. (Until a few years back your only option was full cream cows milk or black.) When traveling I'll go and say Hi to people like Eileen at Ritual or Jeremy at Four Barrel (back before he turned out to be a creep). When I first visited Portland, I had a list of 5-6 places I wanted to visit based on recommendations and reviews, which grew to 12-15 places as I chatted with the baristas at the first few places. On the third day there I was at Coava for the first time, and when I ordered the girl behind the machine said "Oh, you're the crazy Australian with 'the list'!" The baristas there all drink together and talk about the customers :-) That was a super fun trip.

If _I_ were to start a food/beverage business, I'd be insane to target _me_, when the demographic of "people who are OK so long as the coffee isn't awful", and who might choose to spend money at my cafes for other reasons (like I've got one on 3 out of every 4 street corners in Manhattan, for example, or because I've got comfortable chairs and putlets to keep laptops charged) is so many orders of magnitude bigger.