Friends don't let their real friends go to Starbucks.

Yeah. I stand on top of a nearby building and take them out with a sniper rifle.

I don't have friends, I have accomplices.

Consistency alone is not a selling point for me. They use low quality coffee that tastes burnt, stale, and acrid.

It's fine if you like to drink desserts in a paper cup but if you like the taste of a well prepared fresh cup of coffee it is probably not the place to go.

I dealt with the company that handles catering for SSB and their decision is not surprising. Their decisions are very much margin based and they have very little understanding of market trends and tendencies, and their decision making process seems very clumsy, fraught with interpersonal battles, and removed from customer realities. I can only presume Starbucks is able to offer their coffee very cheaply due to its low quality, and that they can sell it to them with the thinnest of margins as the whole deal can be considered virtually a marketing exercise for Starbucks. I think it's a crummy decision and possibly counterproductive for the catering company as they will probably end up selling less coffee than previously.

In my whole life I have been just once in a Starbucks and it wasn't my decision (I was with 5 people). Before that day, I was never interested in going in just because I think it is a wrongly over rated, nothing special, expensive, bad coffee place. Every time I was pasing by I could smell boredom and expensive stuffs. It is just the name that makes people go in and just because it is American, people think it is a great place. For me it is not. I really don't understand what is the big deal about this place. That day I ate a cake that was too dry and a coffee that lasted like ''virgin's pee'' as we say in my country. So I never put my foot in a Starbucks again.

Last Sunday I went to Konstanz and for the second time I ate at a very nice place, it is called PANO Brot und Kaffee. I love this place: affordable, the food is great: they have soups, sandwiches, taaaasty cakes (I love their cakes). The coffee is not special but I am going there for the nice atmosphere and for the good things you can eat. Starbucks has nothing on it.

I on visits to Starbucks NEVER had coffee in a paper cup but always in one of their nice real cups. And Starbucks coffee is NOT cheap but rather expensive.

Let's face it, all european coffee is mostly shit once you've had real Turkish coffee in Turkey or Northern Africa and, though I don't know who keeps Starbucks going, it's pretty clear that there are a lot of people who do given the expansion plans for next year ( http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,3192901.story ) including that they bought Teavana.

I hear the constant drone of people everywhere as to how they can't bear the coffee and, yet, Starbucks seems to always be busy, even in Zurich where the price of a plain cuppa is something in the extreme range.

Or perhaps they do have market understanding. See Poptart's text - it's rather audacious to claim that Starbucks and people who sell it don't know marketing, though I'll grant you that coffee tastes can vary.

Train catering is a loss leader anyway. They are continuously finding excuses to reduce the number of trains that benefit from this service. There was a time that any self-respecting train had both a minibar and a buffet/dining car, then for a while it was either/or and now there are increasingly many trains even on top-link services that have neither. And every year they are re-assessing the remaining (loss making) food services. So anything that keeps those pesky customers away can only be a good thing.

Point taken about the cups, I was thinking of N. America.

Not cheap for the consumer, but to buy the raw coffee beans. They use cheap beans, which bothers me because the margin on coffee for a vendor is excellent (many hundreds of percent) even if you use high quality beans.

Mcdonald's has excellent coffee, they use high quality 100% Arabica beans for it. I don't like anything else there, but I have tried the coffee and it is good.

The coffee beans they use are cheap. The coffee they sell is expensive. It's a sound business practice - getting a low quality raw material and adding customer perceived value so they can sell it at a premium.

The coffee's crap but the leather sofas, free wi-fi and non-stuff atmosphere are great.

And that's the problem I have with the selling of Starbucks coffee on trains here. All the disadvantages and none of the advantages. Someone at SBB really hasn't thought this through.

If you don't mind the yelling and yapping of teenagers.

Now a real coffee house for me is one of those art deco places with chandeliers where you can settle down with a foreign newspaper and the portly Italian waiter who has been in that very same job for 40 years brings you your espresso with a glass of water and a pastry and stops for a bit of small talk and a joke. Not some kid who insists on having my name and then mis-pronounces it.

Agreed. I don't go in Starbucks myself but when people whom I know do frequent the place; they do so for the reasons I cited.

Whoopee Arabica is 60% of the worlds coffee production and is lower in caffeine than other coffee types. So if you want a cup of generic and low buzz coffee - drink McDs coffee

(I love the recent trend to label varietals of food or drink which increases perceived value hugely without people having much idea of what the name actually means )

i go to starbucks because it has the best coffee in the world.

I was referring to the SBB catering company based in ZH. Starbucks is of course extremely sophisticated in their marketing and brand development. I have dealt with their buyers and they are extremely savvy, experienced, and focused, if generally a bit arrogant (which they can afford to be, given their position).

Apart from arabica and robusta, what else is there?

And don't forget... it's freetrade! Uh, I mean, fairtrade

If you'd like to talk coffee I can spend hours, I've been in hospitality all my life, until recently cooking, running restaurants and bars, in many countries. I love ll this stuff and am a geek when it comes to food and drink, and do not fall for marketing ploys. I am very aware of perception biases and I try to blind taste things and remove hype and such from my judgments.

Most all commercial coffee grown in the world is Robusta or Arabica. Companies buy these beans green for their blends, which they source from various countries based on price and flavour profile, to have a consistent style and strength for their brands. Robusta is generally seen as a lower quality bean due to it's acidity and bitterness, and less complex gustative profile, and its lower price is a direct result of its lesser desirability.

In this case 100% Arabica is not an empty marketing term but a good indication that the coffee will be high quality and will make good coffee if it was roasted properly and used fresh.

Don't you mean Freetax (in the U.K. at least).

At least the internet is good for spreading the word in the U.K. for a mass Starbucks boycott because of its creative accounting.