starbucks makes things worse

I'd been watching Starbucks' almost daily public apologies for the decline of their product for about a year before I noticed a serious drop in their already-compromised quality. The event that inspired these public apologies was the widely published coffee-tasting test, in which McDonald's beat out Starbucks for the better-tasting cup of freshly made coffee.

Now this was hardly a revelation. Everyone knows that the baristas at Starbucks have been burning their over-the-counter cups of coffee for years. You can't buy a good-tasting cuppa Joe at Starbucks. But the BEANS were still reliable, at least, and that was what mattered to me. I never bought the coffee of the day; I got around the burnt-coffee problem by always ordering espresso, which I simply watered to my taste Americano-style.

But then came all the public announcements that Starbucks' profits were dropping, followed by further announcements that there would be a huge reorganization that would win back Starbucks' dismayed customers. I even read about some fancy $10,000 espresso machine--the Clover--that would soon be installed in all the stores, which Starbucks had procured exclusive rights to because no other espresso comes out as good.

This is all smoke-and-mirrors, of course; the truth is that Starbucks is not making nearly as much money as it would like, and so it's been embarking on a pretty cutthroat cost-cutting program that hits right across the board, and which includes, no doubt, reducing the cost of producing quality coffee beans. But still, I held out hope. Maybe Starbucks would do the obvious thing and replace their terrible in-store coffee makers with decent ones. Problem solved.

But of course it's never that easy, and the public announcement never comes anywhere close to stating the truth of the matter. Winning back customer loyalty just takes too darned long. You might have to wait years to see your profits crawl back up! And so it goes that over the course of the last two months Starbucks' espresso beans have suddenly acquired the taste of old truck tires.

At first I couldn't figure it out, because the different stores were uneven in their product. The beans that came from one outlet were better than the beans that came from another. And the espresso I ordered directly from the baristas seemed to taste just fine. So what was the problem? I changed my home grinder; I bought a new coffee maker. Was it just me?

Over the next month, though, the low quality became the norm, encompassing every buying venue. The store I'd bought from just a month before was now selling rubber tires shaped like coffee beans, too. Even the espresso from the baristas started tasting different. The behind-the-counter operation had also finally sold out to the devil. The unevenness I had been observing was simply the leveling out of the old product as it was replaced by the newer, fouler stuff.

What's ironic here is the message Starbucks seems to have gotten from that oft-cited taste-off. Customers like cheap, McDonald's-quality coffee, so let's give it to them! McDonald's is making a profit; we can too! All that rhetoric about an improved product and going back to their original coffee-loving roots is just the usual meaningless word dump. What Starbucks sells now is the cheap stuff that tastes like the kind of coffee you can get in any diner, 7-11, or---saddest of all--McDonald's--but at twice the price.

This is a bad business decision, if you ask me. There are plenty of cheap diners around. And it's not going to be long before other consumers like me give up on Starbucks altogether.

In the mean time, it's back to Peets I go. Their Italian roast has that same nutty, slightly caramelized taste that the old Starbucks espresso mix had. It's $2 more per pound, but totally worth it.