Starbucks

I know a lot of people like to give the ol’ Starbucks a hard time and generally, I’m not one of them. I just don’t spend my money there. Aside from the corporate ethics of their tax affairs, I’d just rather give my mocha moolah to support a wee local indie coffee place, and that’s usually what I do given the choice. No fuss, no drama, no gnashing of teeth and wailing about the big corporations taking over our high street. I just go somewhere else. Sometimes, though, you find yourself with a colleague in Central London in the freezing cold with half an hour to kill before a meeting and –oh, look, a handy Starbucks with a side door straight into the reception of the place we are going. So, yeh, I abandoned my Shop Local principles and ended up in a Starbucks. I figured: it’s cold, its dark, it’s December in the London, and I’ve got 3hours of chat about European procurement regulations ahead of me, so I’m gonna have me a soy gingerbread latte. The prices in Starbucks annoy me. Over SIX QUID for two SMALL hot drinks to take away is really daylight robbery. I’m with a colleague and I don’t want to sound like a stingey Scot, though, so I whip out my card to pay for our drinks contactlessly and we’ll say no more about it. This had better be one helluva good gingerbread soy latte, though. Harrumph. Sadly, my drink was Not Good. Not good at all. For starters, it was barely warm. Between tepid and warm, I’d say. Not the most pleasant temperature for a Christmassy latte on a cold day but i could have put up with it if it weren’t for the lumps. Yes, LUMPS. What the what!!! Let me try that again… ewwww, gross, this is definitely lumpy! Like a thick skin had formed over it at some point and someone had tried to stir the skin back in to the hot milk, maybe, and the skin had broken up but clumped together into loose cottage cheesy-​sized lumps? I took it back to the counter and the barista told me the coffee wasn’t lumpy. He didn’t look at it, or taste it or anything — he just said «no it’s not» when I told him what the problem was. That really annoyed me. I had to argue with him and begin to create a scene to get any sort of customer service, and I really, REALLY, hate doing stuff like that. I had to repeat myself 4 times with increasing volume before he would accept that I wasn’t going away. His colleague took the coffee from me and chucked it down the sink and he said he’d make another. The lumps had been a bit stomach-​churningly disgusting, so I didn’t much fancy taking the risk on another milky drink. I asked instead for a black Americano — no milk, so no chance of lumps. He didn’t seem very keen to give me a different (considerably cheaper and I wasn’t even asking for the difference to be refunded) replacement drink but obviously decided I was just a pain in the neck so he said I’d get one. In a flurry of other orders, a black Americano was brusquely slapped down in front of me. I took my coffee and harrumphed out. Without being churlish, I have to say the replacement drink genuinely wasn’t an awful lot better. A bit like dishwater. A tasteless and underwhelming black coffee. With decent beans, a black Americano is hard to mess up, but here was no depth or richness to this coffee. It was like the coffee you get out of those glass jugs that languish on the warming plates in restaurants from the 80’s for hours! I have to say, I think this experience is the final nail in the Starbucks coffin for me as a consumer. I used to be someone who would just prefer to spend my cash elsewhere though I wouldn’t dig my heels in about it if there was no other option; now, however, I am most definitely someone who just won’t go to Starbucks and will just do without a coffee if that was the only option. Lumpy overpriced soy milk, obnoxious service, and dubious corporate ethics? No thanks.

I love the Starbucks in London! They seem to be one of the few places that have air conditioning and pretty speedy wifi. The service is fast and efficient as compared to some they coffee shops in the area (I’m looking at you café Nero)
I love getting either soy cappuccinos or banana frappuccinos customized with soy milk and sugar free vanilla. It’s nice how many options you have here and they don’t charge extra for soy (unlike America)
It’s a great place for studying and hanging out with friends between classes at LSE. Also, I have the gold card so it helps to get a free drink for every 12! Note, for any Starbucks you can also use that free drink for food (ie. Salad/panini=lunch)
Starbucks is always solid. You can count on them for consistent coffee!