friends don't let friends drink starbucks

 

A degree of sadness fell upon me when I learnt that 685 employees [rather "partners" - to hone the official Starbucks term] of Starbucks Coffee were going to lose their jobs in Australia. But I'm not at all sorry to hear that 61 of the 84 Starbucks branches are going to close. My only few regrets are that the company would decide to instead close all 84 branches in Australia; and then in turn, jump over the ditch and do the same here in New Zealand. If the Australian espresso aficionados are lucky, the branches will be replaced with cafes that sell something a little different from what's on offer at Starbucks - a beverage we like to call "coffee".

It would be hypocritical of me not to admit that at times, my own caffeine addiction has driven me to pay Starbucks' exorbitant prices for a substandard cup. But those were times when I was overseas. I'm even willing to confess that I have been to many of the franchises through my travels. So I've actually welcomed the Starbucks logo in places such as Moscow, Bangkok and London.

The mass closure of Starbucks outlets in the United States have been linked to the economic downturn, and fair enough. In America, Starbucks coffees count as expensive luxury items. And if you're serious about coffee, you wouldn't be drinking it, so it's understandable that in tough times, taste-insensitive customers want to go somewhere cheaper.

When Starbucks first opened here, its small size was the regular small coffee size, but that soon ended, and we now have the American sizes, where even the smallest has far too much milk in it. Still, at least it means you can't taste the coffee. Which is obviously why Starbucks likes to put caramel and toffee and other variants of sugar in the coffee to make it more palatable, and the milk taste less burnt.

I'm willing to bet that most people won't mourn Starbucks' passing, in contrast to the US where regulars are organising petitions to save their local branches. A petition in Seattle references the tragic phenomenon of Starbucks outlets being perceived as a yuppie status symbol in much of America, illustrating the terrible deprivation many Americans suffer under, never having known anything better.

But there is one thing that's truly great about Starbucks, which I will miss. This is my vain attempt to inject balance by thinly veiling my delight in dancing on the graves of closed outlets. The saving grace, so to say, is the atmosphere in its outlets. While it is highly corporatised, and naff in it’s attempt to feel like a neighbourhood coffee-house, with all those posters about the amazing coffee varieties from exotic places around the world that Starbucks manages to make taste uniformly bland. There are precious few places where you can sit for hours without feeling unwelcome, and Starbucks, to its credit, offered that.

Sure, part of the reason is that because, since you can now get better espresso even at McDonald's, there's never much demand for tables. But having just spent a few months travelling around major cities, I can say that I often found myself checking into a Starbucks to do a bit of tapping away on a laptop. Sure, I always ordered an orange juice. But nevertheless, its generous attitude to their space was welcome. J.K. Rowling famously wrote much of the Harry Potter series in an Edinburgh Starbucks, which is perhaps where she got the idea for some of the book’s foul concoctions.

The truly sad thing about those "partners" is that their skills won't be transferable. Sure, everyone hires good baristas, but if I was a cafe owner, and someone turned up with a CV noting that he or she had graduated from the Starbucks Coffee University, or whatever they call it, I would send them immediately to some kind of re-education camp on how to really make coffee [sorry Jamie].

Ok, so I'm a horrible coffee snob, with a dependency on the pure Columbian variety, I admit it. This entire blog has been full of the same irritating smugness that makes me go to Mojo and ask, with a straight face, for an "Americano with a shot of hazzlenut".