I have resolved to never again buy “points” of any kind, whether on an app or a game or a themepark or anything else. Either let me spend real money or I am going to assume it is a scam.
You don’t like buying 5% more points than you need for any purchase?
It’s only really a problem when you can’t buy the exact amount of points you need to make a purchase (which granted is most of the time). There’s legitimate reasons for using a “points” middle-man, though - for example, in a game where you can earn premium currency while playing, but also buy it; if you were making purchases directly, rather than buying the points you need, you wouldn’t be able to buy something using both earned and purchased currency; it’d be all or nothing.
This is definitely a very small minority, though, and 99 times out of 100, I agree with you, it’s a scam.
Except even then, they could just list both the real money cost and the in-game points cost. There’s no need for the points to be tied to the real money at all.
What if I want to buy something that costs 1000 points, which equates to $10, and I have 300 points in-game? I want to use those 300 points, but I want to cover the rest with $7 of real money. If they only list two costs - $10 or 1000 points - I can’t do that, but if they let me buy 700 points for $7, I can do it.
They could just list both the full price and the price - the ammount of points you have in dollars.
I disagree about it being legitimate for games with hard currency. Games do it purely for psychological reasons. They could easily let you earn and spend hard currency in game and spend real money directly. But it’s more profitable to have you buy points.
So, I’m a black coffee drinker. No sweetners, no creams, none of that garbage. Went one time to get me a cup of coffee from Starbucks. It tasted like shit. It was burnt. I thought it was just that one place, but nope, it’s every Starbucks place. Their coffee recipe is shit in and of itself, but they hide it under the ton of sugar and other shit they put in it. I never understood why people would kill for it. Also, why does a small cup of black coffee cost $2+?
Their black coffee isn’t great, but their espresso is good which is what makes it into the sugary drinks. I think the main draw is that it’s pretty consistently decent, while with other chains like Dunkin or Wawa you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get but it’s probably not going to be that good. I’ll also add that the coffee they sell at grocery stores isn’t bad (although it’s far from my favorite). I think it’s much worse at Starbucks itself because it inevitably ends up burnt pretty shortly after it’s brewed.
As far as price, it costs $2 because that’s the price that Starbucks determined maximizes profit. From what I’ve seen at other coffee shops though including Mom and Pop ones, that price point is pretty typical.
If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).
You can get coffee from other places than chain coffeeshops for less money and better coffee. The café near me sells great espresso for 12 MAD (about 1 €). The place is nice, has a waiter and coffee is server in glass or porcelaine cups in stead of cheap plastic. You can get it from other places for the cheapest place at 6 MAD.
Heavily disagree, I drink the espresso there once in a while and it tastes like shit every time.
*When compared to independent shops.
Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.
Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).
Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.
People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.
In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.
That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.
I’m sure it’s also completely coincidental that burnt coffee tastes mostly same no matter where and when the beans came from. :-)
I’m from a country where we literally, grew, harvested, roasted and brewed our coffee. lol We had a tradition where the coffee HAD to be roasted and brewed on bone fire that is made out of certain shrubs stems. I know, it is crazy, but that is how it was there. Oh, and did I mention that we had to grind the coffee by hand? So, I have completely different standards/expectations when it comes to coffee, and that’s also why I drink it black. That is how we drank it. I now grind and brew my own coffee at home, and those starshit encounters happened only because I was traveling, otherwise, my coffee is all made at home.
Also, why does a small cup of black coffee cost $2+
CEO needs another yacht, my dude.
Dark Roasted coffee is the only way Starbucks can be Starbucks.
Lighter-roasted coffee emphasizes origin flavors and i agree with you --generally tastes better and is more interesting.
But you can’t sell coffee like that in tens of thousands of coffee shops and have it remotely consistent.
Coffee growing from the same plot but on one side of a hill will taste different from the other side due to getting different quantities of sunlight. Complex origin flavors will always be the domain of small specialty coffee shops.
Starbucks has McDonalds-like consistency serving millions of customers a day and that’s only because they emphasize the flavors they can get consistently–roast flavors.
TL;DR The bigger the chain, the darker you have to roast. That’s just how coffee works.
Totally this.
Pretty much every chain cafe roasts their beans to an inch of their life, to give them a generic “coffee” flavour profile.Because god forbid coffee have even the slight variance of flavour.
To add to all this, if most of your customers are seriously there to taste their flavored syrups and milk of their favorite drink, you wouldn’t want to alter or even ruin that with unexpected, unique coffee flavors.
May as well add caffeine to a milkshake at that point …
Plenty of independent coffee shops sell Lotus energy drinks for this exact reason.
From what I understand, part of Starbucks thing is catering to people who like burnt and bitter. Kind of like the emo crowd.
That shit is disgusting. I have read somewhere (not 100% sure) that Starbucks failed miserably in Australia because of how shitty their coffee tasted for the Aussies.
I drink espresso (like just shoot a double shot back) and their stuff leaves a terrible aftertaste.
Edit: If you like black coffee, go for a medium roast premium or specialty grade coffee from Costa Rica that goes through a honey process. Very smooth, low acid and a hint of natural sweetness from the coffee fruit.
Yeah, they over roast their coffee. It’s deliberate. I assume it’s for consistency and because it’s a low effort way to cut through all that milk and sugar in expensive lattes. Americans have also been conditioned to associate dark, bitter coffee with “strong”.
The irony is dark roast has less caffeine than lighter roast and it’s usually done to mask defects in the bean. Whether to roast light, medium or dark typically isn’t an arbitrary decision or based on any preference. There’s a whole grading process where the ideal roast is determined based on the quality of the beans.
The highest quality beans will often be roasted medium and you start going darker as you get into the lower quality stuff. Basically, you’re cooking off bad flavors that may be the result of sour beans, mold, insect damage, chemicals or worse. There are all kinds of farming practices you don’t want to know about where they get away with it by roasting dark and/or blending with a little bit of a higher quality coffee.
The thing with Starbucks is they actually start with good beans so they don’t have to do this. They also have a wide variety of suppliers and bean types. They could easily put together a great flavor profile that would work for lattes as well as black coffee. But things do change a little bit from one harvest to the next. Starbucks is all about consistency. You can order the same drink at any location in the world and it tastes exactly the same every time.
A small black coffee is $2 because people will pay that much. The cost is less than 25 cents for the coffee. The cup and lid might cost more than what you’re drinking if it’s a commercial grade bean. Coffee is a high margin business.
While the news is interesting, it is not about technology at all. Just because Starbucks has an app does not make this technology related news.
The source is Android Authority and it appears to be referencing dark patterns in mobile apps
It’s about the intersection of their app, their rewards systems and the dark patterns in the whole system that lead to them accruing a lot of money that they don’t really deserve. That’s pretty much a tech story.
So the lawsuit is about them declaring unspent gift cards as profit in their financial report? Way less shady than what the title suggests…
So it’s not a lawsuit (yet), it’s a complaint to the state attorney general of Washington accusing Starbucks of unfriendly consumer practices related to their gift cards, in part because they can recognize unspent gift cards as revenue, and also because it’s instant cashflow for them even if the accounting revenue lags behind. The need to come up with a calculation for how much deferred revenue to recognize can be abused by execs to nudge the revenue higher (and with no additional costs associated with it, profit as well) and thereby improve stock price and trigger bonuses and whatnot.
The actual complaint reads as a bit of pearl-clutching (“involuntary subscription” because customers don’t want to leave a balance OR talk to a real human at their local Starbucks!) , but on a the “death by a thousand cuts” model, yeah, I suppose Starbucks is being kinda dickish. The app doesn’t give you as many rewards if you pay with CC, buries the other payment options a couple of layers deep in a menu, doesn’t let you reload gift cards in increments equal to a purchase, doesn’t let you split payment methods, and sets a high default reload so (on iOS at least) it isn’t immediately visible that you even could scroll up to reload in smaller amounts.
It’s sort of garden variety asshole app design meant to soft-lock customers in, but it’s not really fraud in any meaningful way if someone is motivated. You add money, you get bitter overpriced coffee that your partner really likes for some reason. I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL. Still, maybe worth a public scolding or some fines to get them to modify it so people can save a few bucks without diving into the finer nuances of their coffee app.
I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL.
😄. Get yourself a decent burr grinder, a French press, and some Aldi oat milk (if you don’t want black) and you can make as good a cup of coffee as you can get at the best coffee shops.
I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.
I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)
Honestly, this is exactly what I thought the complaint was going to be when I saw the headline and it’s getting me thinking. Does Starbucks allow split payments between two methods. If not, that’s the solution to this problem is require them to.
I end up having a bunch of gift cards to Starbucks through the year because my father in law knows I like coffee so he gets me Starbucks gift cards, not because I love Starbucks but because he can get them on Amazon. I’ll have to try this out next time I’m nearing the bottom.
I will say, the stars that build up over the course of my gift card draining more than pays for the dollar or change at the end with free drinks. So it’s never really bothered me that much, but now I’m curious.
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No, it’s not. The complaint is linked in the article, here is the first sentence:
For several years, Starbucks has subsidized its operations with significant customer cash inflows generated at least in part by using unfair and deceptive practices to manipulate its 33-million rewards program members into paying in advance for their purchase.
It goes on to describe dark patterns manipulating consumers into spending more than they would otherwise. You are describing one of the motivations for Starbucks to do so.
This tracks. I get Starbucks giftcards (as gifts, not for myself) and typically load them into the app so I can order ahead and spend less time waiting at the store. It pisses me off to no end that when I get to the last dollar or two, I can’t use it without reloading like $20 onto the app. I refuse to do that and lose the money.
I’ve never had a Starbucks gift card or used the app, but in the article they say that in store you can do a split payment using up either gift card or app balance, and pay the remainder cash. Is that something you’ve tried?
Starbucks disputed the allegations and told Fortune that customers can pay for their orders with whatever balance is left on their app or gift card and pay the remaining amount in cash at the store, thus reaching a zero balance.
So, this is not true? What’s the actual truth to this functionality?
The truth is that a lot of loyal customers are boycotting Starbucks right now over unionization and their stance on Palestine. So Starbucks is trying to bring them back physically into the stores and are using the balance on their cards as leverage. Starbucks has already uncharacteristically been running several promotions to get people back to their stores, with the red cup and the Stanley thing.
If Starbucks has to return the customers’ unused balance without bringing them into the stores, then they may have lost those customers for good.
I regularly get them from family, its annoying for this reason. But its better just use the remainders as a few bucks off a regular purchase (that id make anyway).
Lovely use of the word “profit” in the title then switching it to “revenue” in the actual article. Different things.
I stopped drinking Starbucks 12 years ago and I rarely drink coffee. I might get a few of those hot gas station French vanilla coffees in the winter but that’s about it.
French vanilla coffees?
Like in France, the country that invented the espresso?
😭
Jk, you do your stuff ofc 😊
Wait till we tell you about our crescent rolls.
French Vanilla has hazlenut flavour mixed in IIRC
They have a point, you cannot split payment methods if you want to order ahead, and the minimum reload is $10. If you order in person they can do it for you but ordering ahead is a main draw to using the app and you earn fewer "stars’ without a gift card.
I don’t understand why people would even do this.
Buy points for… what reason exactly?
As a gift
