Starbucks: Location Closures and Elimination of Roles

I've only been to the Reserve location in Midtown Manhattan once and it was very different experience than your run-of-the-mill location. Specifically, I had a drink replaced without asking because the barista said it had "died" while I was in the (nice, clean, great smelling) restroom. Overall, it was just a nice, pleasant experience and I definitely would have frequented that location if I was working in that area regularly. I wonder if this shop was a union one? That might explain why everyone was so pleasant and why it seems to have been closed.

I still remember my first starbucks visit as a 13 y.o. Sitting down, having a coffee, not knowing what caffeine was, and having the best conversation of my life.

It was the case since forever ( ~15 years+ ). Starbucks is not a speciality coffee shop. There is nothing wrong with that. One has to acknowledge that high volume coffee shops have to rely on basically burned beans in order to be consistent with the taste.

You can order exactly as much sugar as you want for their drinks. If you order a Cappuccino with milk or a coffee or Americano, there isn't any sugar in any of the drinks.

I've taken that approach and think it's sound advice.

The Starbucks's near me in Canada are fine. If they get rid of the long line of mobile order people, they'd be pretty fine.

When are small coffee shops going to understand, if you have a 1 hour limit on how long I can sit there on my laptop (if you even allow laptops), I’m not going to go to your shop. Coffee doesn’t matter, it’s all the same shit.

Starbucks has never cared if I buy one coffee and then sit there all day.

I wrote all that in the past tense because none of the things I liked about starbucks is uniformly available any longer.

I don't really like Starbucks, but I feel a need to defend them that they have earned their success in ways other than marketing.

We have other chains here, like Blenz, which are franchised rather than corporate, and the quality is hit or miss. I went to a Blenz location once and got a drink far better than anything else I've had in the city, but most of the time I go there I get something mediocre and poorly-made.

Meanwhile, every latte I get from a Starbucks comes out of an automated espresso machine but it comes out pretty much the same every time. The pastries are all pre-packaged and made at some industrial kitchen probably not even in the same time zone, but, again, they're the same every time. And especially when my son was a baby, my wife and I got into the habit of going to Starbucks very frequently because it was one of the only retail anything that always had changing tables in the bathroom, and, if they had gendered washrooms, always had a changing table in the men's room as well. Every other place was hit or miss, and it didn't take long before I got tired of changing my son on (a changing mat on) a filthy bathroom floor.

Back to drinks, though, there are a lot of other small, independent cafes around, and smaller chains like Artigiano which give you better coffee (or pastries or tea or ...), but they're a lot less commonly found.

Now, all that being said, I would kick a (picture of) a puppy if I could get a Te & Kaffi location in Vancouver; the instant I walked into one for the first time in Iceland it reminded me why I originally liked working in a cafe in my twenties - it felt cozy, comfortable, and it smelled deliciously of fresh coffee. It's a lot rarer to get that here for some reason.

They served as a pub, in the public house sense, for young professionals.

I think covid really derailed that and the vibe never quite returned. I'm not sure what people are using for a 'third place' (not home or work) these days but Starbucks is out of fashion and sometimes generally hostile to customer loitering now.

They are not hostile to laptops, and overall they have a well-thought out vibe with convenient seating and electricity plugs everywhere

I used to go into smaller coffee shops and it was a 50/50 gamble that I was going to get terrible coffee (though more recently, I've had better luck). At least with Starbucks I knew I was going to get average coffee every single time.

That being said, I make 95% of my coffee at home.

It's the McDonalds of coffee. There are lot of better restaurants than McDonalads for sure but a random restaurant could also be worse. So McDonalds provides some low common denominator consistency. Same with Starbucks, coffee may not be the best and sandwiches are so so, but you know what you're getting there.

I find myself there when I travel to another city and need to grab something on the go. I could sit down and start researching local coffee shops if I have time, but if don't, I can pop in and out of Starbucks and know exactly what I'll get.

It’s very rare to find a local coffee shop in the U.S. with a drive-thru.

I've been to one in Milan, in the old postoffice building right smack in the middle of the city and it has an astounding selection of coffee styles and very cool ambiance [1].

But, yeah, I agree that regular shops are underwhelming and overpriced by local European norms.

[1] https://www.roastery.starbucks.it/

But everywhere Ive lived (rural New England and now Seattle) there has always been cheaper better coffee available at local shops. It seems that people who like starbucks and people who are into coffee are consumer groups with little crossover

I think they basically developed a quality brand then just gutted the quality everywhere else to expand and it worked.

Edit: I'm too young for this, but it's along the lines of Personnel from the '60s becoming Human Resources in the '70s and '80s, and Human Resources from the '90s and '00s now becoming People Operations in the '10s and '20s.

I suspect in the '30s it'll change again. Maybe one day there will be a culture change towards boring and we'll just call people "customers," "employees," and the departments responsible for hiring the "Hiring Department."

And people will get mad about that, too, because the HD will be responsible for the paperwork required to fire people, too.