The struggling coffee chain has tapped Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol to be its new chairman and CEO, effective September 9. Starbucks’ stock soared more than 13% in premarket trading, while Chipotle’s dipped 8%.
Niccol has been leading the Mexican-inspired food chain since 2018, with Starbucks saying he has set “new standards in the industry and driven significant growth and value creation,” pointing to its revenue growing nearly 800% during his tenure.
Schultz came out of retirement just to shit on unionizing efforts and then pass it along. Just a little union busting, as a treat.
One thing that confounded me when I went to Starbucks for the first time. Asked them for a large black coffee. Since their coffee is way overbrewed so it can be mixed with stuff, it was super strong super hot garbage.
Someone later told me to order it with a little ice to make it drinkable and dilute the flavor.
My question was: why can’t I just buy coffee at a coffee place?
Have a stack of 5-10 year old Starbucks gift cards I’ve collected from various work functions that are still valid. I still haven’t gone back. They can’t even get me as a free customer.
Why don’t you give those cards away to homeless people or food banks? They could use it
Starbucks closes shops that vote to unionize. Boycott Starbucks.
Support local independent coffee shops.
My local coffee shop donates all proceeds to orphan cage fights :(
Do you not want stronger orphans? This toughens them up…
At least it’s not homeless cage fights.
I mean technically orphans are homeless.
Not if they live in the orphanarium 🚀
Well if you call that home 🤷
Granted it needs at least one more wall, and more diverse diatary options* but it’s a start 😉
*books are vegan though!
And you get the added benefit of not overpaying for shitty burnt coffee.
benefit of not overpaying for shitty burnt coffee.
Sir, this is a Tim Hortons. If you want unburnt coffee, the McDonalds is just over there.
Drink local.
Just make coffee at home before you leave. 10 minutes versus however long the coffee shop trip costs in time and money. Even faster if you get a basic coffeemaker that has a clock that can be set to start up automatically.
Coffee shops are overpriced for the mediocrity.
Ok but I don’t have any teenagers at home who will make whatever they want instead of what I ordered and take 20 minutes to do it.
While I agree, part of it is the experience. Some people want to spend time away from home, and for many families that is a way to buy one drink and get alone time or a place to sit with friends for a while. Sometimes it’s also the skill in the drink itself (not Starbucks, though). So in those cases, drink local.
Yes. This way, the local guy I’ll never know, who employs dozens of local people, will get his profits; instead of a remote guy I’ll never know, who employs dozens of local people. Help me understand which stranger is more worthy, then, based on the zip code of their house?
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There are plenty of tiny coffee places (and other small businesses) near me where the owner is there all day, every day with just one or two employees. You’ll get to know them if you want to. You might also bump into them around town. If they suck, patronize a different place.
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Theoretically, most of the money that I spend there stays in town, helping to keep other businesses and families going. They probably sponsor the local animal shelter or little league team. I like that.
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I’ve worked in small businesses and corporate America. In my experience corporate America always sucks, small business only sometimes suck. I don’t like supporting large corporations and especially not their admin and C-suite. Those vampires are why the wealth gap is growing so quickly.
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Corporate food is boring.
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Some people argue that all of the transportation involved in moving around product and people for multi-national corporations is worse for the environment. I don’t care about that personally but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.
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Have you been to local shops? Usually local owners participate in the business, we see ours roasting all the time. The last place we went when traveling was opened right next to the AT by a hiker who runs it by herself with a friend.
If you haven’t met the owner, you probably haven’t tried to. But my guess is, you don’t go there anyway out of some weird spite.
This dude ruined chipotle in so many ways. Cutting serving sizes, using lower quality ingredients, reducing employee count and training quality, just letting everything slip. He took that chain from one of the most reliable to somewhere I refuse to set foot in.
But line went up, clearly he’s a genius, fail into the next role!
I agree with all those points except the serving size one. I remember reading recently that the CEO was upset about some locations skimping after people complained and sent corpos out to retrain them.
According to their PR statement.
We can now get e.coli at an anti-union coffee grift establishment?
Sweet!
Strange that I am in active boycott of two restaurants, and it happens to be both of these places. Not for anything high minded - they both discontinued their chorizo offerings, the only thing I liked on either of their menus. Happened 7 or 8 years ago now, and I won’t go back.
I don’t understand the obsession with either of these restaurants
- Caffeine is addictive,
- sugar gives you the zoomies, and
- frothy milk is delicious.
That’s the coffee part handled, anyway. The only improvement would be allow for alcohol, I think, as I’m really sure an irish coffee all day would improve my morning commute – the bus driver would be so much more relaxed!
It’s strange how the Internet turned on Chipolte. When they were first expanding, everyone raved about how great they were. Then there’s a few very public food safety issues, which certainly doesn’t put them in a good light. They didn’t make any particular changes to their recipes AFAIK due to that. If you thought they were tasty before, then that opinion should be the same now even if you avoid them due to untrustworthy food safety.
I dunno; the Mexican fried rice they use tends to sit heavy in my stomach, so I avoid them, anyway.
Moe’s Southwest grill is exactly the same as chipotle but their food is higher quality and they give you free nachos
I used to love Starbucks because it was a great place to get coffee and chill. Then the whole anti-unions thing, and local coffee shops did it better making me drop Starbucks.
I used to love Chipotle because of their quality and price. Then portions got weirder. Every week was a new food recall. The ones near me look filthy and sad, and that made me drop Chipotle.
To see both of their names together… Yikes.
For Mexican food, try your local mexican Doña or Don.
You’re looking for the place that uses paper plates, has a website, but clearly took the picture of their food 10 years ago with a Motorola Razr.
Website? Negative ghost rider.
You’re looking for the place with the small self-serve sauces, jalapeños and pickled carrots &onions. Never tablecloths. Strip mall locations only if located in the US Southwest. Wheels +3 to menu, -1 cost modifiers. +5 to taste if Latinx customers eat there.
Is that the guy that turns his head sideways for more rice and chicken on his burrito
Chipotle was good years ago.
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It was tasty and a decent enough value through the mid-2010s.
Since then, quality has plummeted, sizes halved, and prices doubled - so if it’s not extremely convenient, it’s far from worth it.
Huh, look at that. Niccol took the reins in 2018, right at the time of the shift. Doesn’t matter, line goed up!
I guess it’s still able to make money by coasting on brand recognition, but Bri-Bri is already long gone and won’t have to worry about the consequences.
What little quality Starbucks has left is about to go the same way - but it’s got even more inertial
The enshittifiation continues.
I prefer just black coffee. No milk, sugar.
Out of all chain coffee places (in the UK, so costa/nero etc), starbucks has the worst tasting coffee
Yes, true of most any national/international chain.
It’s because they value large volume, year round availability, and high consistency from their beans and roasts, so that no matter what location you go to it tastes exactly the same.
To do that, they select and blend several bland varieties of coffee bean, put them through an aggressive industrial cleaning and drying (which reduces the natural fruity and funky flavors but minimizes costs) then roast them in huge batches to several steps past where a normal roaster would stop for a given roast (a darker roast gets rid of more of the unique flavors of the coffee cherry and brings out more uniform roast flavors instead).
Again, not something exclusive to Starbucks at all, and plenty of small coffee shops don’t bother with the hassle and just buy cheap bulk coffee pre-roasted by large scale operations and will have similar results.
But man, when you get coffee made in small batches, with natural processing or even fermentation and gently roasted… It’s an entirely different experience.
It’s just weird that any chain would opt for consistently awful instead of just settling for slight variations. It’s also weird that people still buy it despite the fact it is objectively and consistently bad.
People who are going to Starbucks often aren’t drinking black coffee. They get some sugar, cream, and flavor combo such that the coffee is barely noticeable. It is coffee for people who don’t like coffee.
Any time you blend beans from different places together, you get a bland coffee. I don’t think any mega size coffee shop can ever beat locals just because scale demands won’t allow non-blended beans in the supply chain.
As someone who also only drinks black coffee I agree. Their signature taste is literally burnt because of the way they roast their beans. It’s terrible.
McDonald’s has better tasting coffee than Starbucks since they swiped Tim Horton’s vendor a few years ago.
Starbucks is sugary, trash water. Brew your own coffee at home. Costs way less, tastes much better, and it’s significantly healthier compared to the flavored milk they sell.
But if I brew my own coffee at home, how will people know I’m writing a screenplay?
In my experience, anyone I’ve ever known who is earnestly writing a book or a screenplay doesn’t shut up about it, regardless of whether they go to Starbucks or not.
