I never understood Starbucks. I live in Europe, we have good coffee places everywhere. They are cheaper and serve significantly better coffee. I can't think of anything I ordered from Starbucks that didn't taste artificial.

In the US specialty coffee shops may be just as expensive or more expensive than Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't make good coffee, however they're main competitors in the US are basically Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, or various regional/local chains. So they are often better than the competitors, since Dunkin Donuts is not as consistent of quality, and McDonalds isn't really a cafe (despite being one of the largest coffee sellers). A lot of local places also close at like 2 or 3 pm, so if I want to grab a coffee at 3 pm, or meet a friend I don't have a ton of options.

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.

They have passable coffee but I think they actually did a good job of curating a good place to simply be.

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.

> I never understood Starbucks

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.

Starbucks raised the bar for coffee in the US. In most cities big and small, there's better alternatives now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_coffee

at least in america I think it’s a consumer comfort thing. Like no matter where you are you can get close to the exact same sugar-coffee-cream-drink-thing at any starbucks on the continent, and it’s not really about having actually good coffee (their drip coffee is actually terrible).

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

This has changed, it used to be that Starbucks was the only decent coffee in most towns. The thing is there's now so many coffee enthusiasts who grew up in the third wave of coffee that you can easily start and staff a great local coffee shop

I live in Canada and the main reason I like Starbucks is that its consistent. It's not great coffee or great pastries or great whatever else, but it's always the same.

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.

Starbucks is airport drink/food for me. Being able to order as I enter the TSA line and pick it up on the way to the gate is unmatched convenience, and the coffee options at airports generally aren't great.

Our car culture in the U.S. means drive thrus can capture a significant portion of sales. Starbucks/Dunkin/McDonald’s do that.

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

The ones in Seattle were solid. Not sure why, but I could never order a coffee from any of the other ones again after that, it seemed like the rest were fake ripoffs.

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

It has always seemed to me that Starbucks has one thing going for it - consistency.

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.

Starbucks is pretty popular in Europe, even in places with better coffee. That’s because it’s better thought of as a combination between energy drinks and dessert, not a competitor to third-wave coffee shops or espresso bars. The vast, vast majority of their customers are not buying black coffee.

Its not for the coffee

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

For me, I just order a drink when my wife stops by one to order one. I hardly go out of my way to order it myself. Everything from the drinks to the pastries are mediocre

I am in America - I genuinely liked some of their flavors, fast service, and happy demeanor of baristas. It always felt like a familiar nice escape from the grind.

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

In the US Starbucks is almost always the cheapest option in the area for decent coffee.

i think it’s mostly for american tourists

Starbucks was a novelty in the Netherlands of the mid 90s but Dutch people are masters in assimilating and adapting foreign ideas and there are several competing chains now.

I go to Starbucks for the co-working vibes, not the coffee.

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.