| ▲ | danudey 8 hours ago | |
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. | ||
| ▲ | jzebedee 8 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Interestingly, this was the marketing behind Koala Kare's rise to a monopoly over the bathroom baby changing station: > Business owners just couldn’t see the use case for changing stations. Hilger says he was trying to sell the device to “men in their 50s who never changed a diaper in their life.” > A new brochure — this one depicting a woman on her hands and knees changing her baby’s diaper on a disgusting bathroom floor– did the trick. “We had to make them feel guilty,” Hilger says. | ||