Why I don't tip at Starbucks (unless it's Christmas Day)
(Originally posted on my blog, CaptainOfTheInternet.com)
Earlier this afternoon, I asked my wife to walk to Starbucks, two blocks away, and get me some coffee. Surprisingly, she said, sure, and then we debated over whether it was going to rain on her or not. My stance was that the sky was overcast, a light grey, but shouldn't rain for a couple of hours. She was worried about being soaked. But like a good couple, we compromised, and she took a scarf.
Not five minutes later, I received a call from 8|7-9x9-79|x. The phone number didn't mean much to me because our home phone's little Caller ID screen has damaged LED dots and we've trained ourselves to recognize phone numbers based off the few digits that actually work in their entirety. Still though, I can't remember phone numbers very well.
It was my wife, and it was raining hard. She was a good sport though and continued on to Starbucks, bringing me back a decaffeinated Grande Gingerbread Latte just a couple of minutes later.
This is when I discovered that Starbucks drinks without the caffeine taste like burnt bean water mixed with sweetened milk and spices. I really like their drinks, so this was a $3.80 disaster that put a huge dent in the $40 of Starbucks gift cards we received for Christmas.
I set out to understand how this could possibly happen:
This year, Starbucks made over 13 trillion dollars. Their CEO amusingly received a trifling $2.49 million dollar bonus for a job well done, and the Christmas cheer was passed on to the actual employees with each non-management employee of Starbucks receiving a $250 Christmas bonus. Ho ho ho.
Most two pound bags of Starbucks coffee cost $19.98 retail. This includes coffee blends with colorful names like Lightnote, Ethopia Sidamo, and Yukon Blend. Coffee sources that are better for the world order like Fair Trade, Organic, and Shade Grown cost a few dollars more. Interestingly, there's no single blend sold by Starbucks that manages to be Organic, Shade Grown and supports Fair Trade all at the same time, so no matter what you do, you're screwing someone (i.e. farmers, the indigineous wildlife, and your own body).
Their Decaffeinated House Blend costs $21.38, just over a dollar more than their regular house blend. But none of this helps explain why their decaffeinated coffee tasted like burnt tires. To understand that, we needed to turn to the experts: Coffee 101 and How Stuff Works.
Coffee is decaffeinated by washing the caffeine out of the pre-roasted beans by either using a safe chemical solvent like Methylene Chloride (mmmm...), steaming the beans and scraping the outer caffeine-rich layers away with a blade, or by soaking the beans for a time in hot water, which is then carbon-filtered and returned to the soggy beans for reabsorption. At the time of this writing, Starbucks has not commented on their website on which method they use for decaffeinating their beans. Every method of decaffeination results in some loss of flavor.
Interestingly, there is a fourth method of decaffeination that doesn't result in a loss of flavor, it's called Swiss Water Decaffeination and is a process where the coffee beans are soaked for a time in hot water that is saturated with coffee flavor, then the caffeine-laden broth is thrown out. Sounds pretty repulsive to me.
I'll just say, I'm not getting decaffeinated espresso at Starbucks again.
In the course of researching this article, I've discovered that one of Starbucks' corporate goals is to open four new cafes every day, they're installing ovens over the next year in their stores to heat $3.00 pre-made egg and muffin sandwiches (available in Bacon, Sausage, and Spinach flavors), and they're currently testing a new drink called CHANTICO which should be available on or around January 8th in your local Starbucks; CHANTICO is best described as a melted chocolate bar in a cup -- it's steamed with cocoa butter and whole milk for christ sakes -- we'll see how it tastes later.
(Originally posted on my blog, CaptainOfTheInternet.com)
Earlier this afternoon, I asked my wife to walk to Starbucks, two blocks away, and get me some coffee. Surprisingly, she said, sure, and then we debated over whether it was going to rain on her or not. My stance was that the sky was overcast, a light grey, but shouldn't rain for a couple of hours. She was worried about being soaked. But like a good couple, we compromised, and she took a scarf.
Not five minutes later, I received a call from 8|7-9x9-79|x. The phone number didn't mean much to me because our home phone's little Caller ID screen has damaged LED dots and we've trained ourselves to recognize phone numbers based off the few digits that actually work in their entirety. Still though, I can't remember phone numbers very well.
It was my wife, and it was raining hard. She was a good sport though and continued on to Starbucks, bringing me back a decaffeinated Grande Gingerbread Latte just a couple of minutes later.
This is when I discovered that Starbucks drinks without the caffeine taste like burnt bean water mixed with sweetened milk and spices. I really like their drinks, so this was a $3.80 disaster that put a huge dent in the $40 of Starbucks gift cards we received for Christmas.
I set out to understand how this could possibly happen:
This year, Starbucks made over 13 trillion dollars. Their CEO amusingly received a trifling $2.49 million dollar bonus for a job well done, and the Christmas cheer was passed on to the actual employees with each non-management employee of Starbucks receiving a $250 Christmas bonus. Ho ho ho.
Most two pound bags of Starbucks coffee cost $19.98 retail. This includes coffee blends with colorful names like Lightnote, Ethopia Sidamo, and Yukon Blend. Coffee sources that are better for the world order like Fair Trade, Organic, and Shade Grown cost a few dollars more. Interestingly, there's no single blend sold by Starbucks that manages to be Organic, Shade Grown and supports Fair Trade all at the same time, so no matter what you do, you're screwing someone (i.e. farmers, the indigineous wildlife, and your own body).
Their Decaffeinated House Blend costs $21.38, just over a dollar more than their regular house blend. But none of this helps explain why their decaffeinated coffee tasted like burnt tires. To understand that, we needed to turn to the experts: Coffee 101 and How Stuff Works.
Coffee is decaffeinated by washing the caffeine out of the pre-roasted beans by either using a safe chemical solvent like Methylene Chloride (mmmm...), steaming the beans and scraping the outer caffeine-rich layers away with a blade, or by soaking the beans for a time in hot water, which is then carbon-filtered and returned to the soggy beans for reabsorption. At the time of this writing, Starbucks has not commented on their website on which method they use for decaffeinating their beans. Every method of decaffeination results in some loss of flavor.
Interestingly, there is a fourth method of decaffeination that doesn't result in a loss of flavor, it's called Swiss Water Decaffeination and is a process where the coffee beans are soaked for a time in hot water that is saturated with coffee flavor, then the caffeine-laden broth is thrown out. Sounds pretty repulsive to me.
I'll just say, I'm not getting decaffeinated espresso at Starbucks again.
In the course of researching this article, I've discovered that one of Starbucks' corporate goals is to open four new cafes every day, they're installing ovens over the next year in their stores to heat $3.00 pre-made egg and muffin sandwiches (available in Bacon, Sausage, and Spinach flavors), and they're currently testing a new drink called CHANTICO which should be available on or around January 8th in your local Starbucks; CHANTICO is best described as a melted chocolate bar in a cup -- it's steamed with cocoa butter and whole milk for christ sakes -- we'll see how it tastes later.