After all these years, I've reached a very important conclusion: I'm a simple kind of girl. I like my produce plain and unadorned. Most days, I only wear sunblock and lipgloss. I have never owned a blow dryer. I truly believe that sunshine and a long walk does more for your spirits than any self-help book.
This, I suspect, is why I hate Starbucks. Oh, don't get me wrong. 3 out of 7 days of the week, you will probably find me at a Starbucks. I wish I could be more militant about it, and be one of those people brews their tea at home to bring to work. But I don't. I'm lazy. And Starbucks is so ubiquitous. Which brings me to my first point:
1. Number of branches
There are 7 (count them, 7) Starbucks on South Beach. Do you know how small South Beach is? You can never have a secret hookup with someone and not run into them at your gym thirty minutes later. I know all the homeless people by their smells. Gossip travels at the speed of light. THAT'S how small it is. So why are there 3 Starbucks on Lincoln Rd alone? Is it because we have all suddenly developed a taste for Javanese coffee roasts? No, my friends. It's called being a "loss leader." Starbucks doesn't give a shit whether they make money or not, because this is a publicly traded company with deep, deep pockets. Their only goal is to grow and expand as quickly as possible, so that eventually all mom and pop businesses get edged out of market share. The kicker is, the bigger something gets, the shittier the quality becomes. Like McDonalds. Which brings me to my next point.
2. Quality
A rose by any other name doth smell as sweet. Especially if you're on the Starbucks marketing team. Brazil Ipanema Bourbon? Joya del Dia? Guatemala Casi Cielo? Are you fucking kidding me, people? Your coffee SUCKS. The best coffee that I have ever had was at a lowly hawker stall in Singapore. It was rich, black and gleaming. It smelled full-bodied and robust, and it woke your ass up at 6AM , a full-on caffeine extravaganza. And it was called, simply, "coffee." Your Mocha Sanani Cha-cha-la-la by comparison, tastes like a cross between drain cleaner and flat Pepsi. The fact that you are exploiting Third World Countries and militia-led countries to harvest cheap beans doesn't make my cuppa joe taste any better.
3. Music
Enough with the lesbian folk singers and the Miles Davis already. We get it! We, your target audience, are supposed to be sophisticated and discerning connoisseurs of world music. So why is that that every time I walk in, some Jewel rip-off is warbling in the distance? Did anyone at the mothership do their market segmentation research? Are you guys aware that Miami is 80% Latin, and that you'd be better off playing Suenelo Sound System or at the very least, classic Celia Cruz? Must you subject the entire world to what sounds like the Dawson's Creek soundtrack? I have news for you - THERE ARE NO WHITE PEOPLE IN MIAMI. THEY HAVE ALL FLED TO BROWARD.
4. Pretentiousness
Of all the things that piss me off most, being pretentious tops the list. This is why it irks me to no end, when people do things like perfume their dogs and bring them to pet yoga. That's called "being an asshole." On this note, the "The Way I See It" ad campaign has raised Starbucks' asshole-ness to an unprecedented level. It is bad enough that self-help gurus and life coaches clog the airwaves. Must we now suffer the travesty of having dimestore philosophy on our coffee cups? And it's a "medium" chamomile tea, not a "Grande." You're headquartered in Seattle, not Florence. Oh, and you want me to TIP YOU for this holy annoyance? No thanks. Give me my change, all of it. The next time I'm feeling introspective and want to read someone else's rhetoric, I'll crack open my copy of Hume.