Hacker News Reader

Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that he brings up "a robot to automatically brew Starbucks-caliber coffee".

Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1 (in AUD; around 70c in USD). Yet in spite of this, we have a thriving cafe scene where people will gladly pay $4-$5 for a take-away latte.

What's equally "irrational" is that Starbucks, despite the high amount of effort put into each drink, is generally considered to be worse than the $1 coffee from 7-11 or Coles Express.

I'm not 100% sure what the takeaway point is, but it was just so jarring to read that Americans view Starbucks as a luxury rather than some kind of bizarro-world meme.

View on HN

I remember when Starbucks first arrived in Australia there were several articles talking about exactly this topic. Because cheap espresso coffee is ubiquitous in Australia, Starbucks doesn't provide the same value-add that it did in the US where most coffee was weak drip coffee to begin with. I think it took years of careful marketing till Starbucks was able to "train" Australians to pay double for their mixed drinks than what they used to pay for regular espresso coffees. I suspect nowadays people don't really see Starbucks as a coffee, but as its own exclusive flavored hot drink that operates more as a status symbol.

To be fair, this is largely how Starbucks operates in the US too. I used to drink garbage drip coffee all the time, but when I went to Starbucks it was a "skim flat white with cinnamon, please."

It's not a coffee shop, it's fast food for rich folk.

I just looked up a couple of articles myself. Apparently they entered the market in 2000, expanded rapidly but closed a whole lot of stores in 2008. As of 2022 they're still yet to turn a profit.

I don't think it's a case of them requiring years of marketing to convince the general Australian public to pay more (you go past the store at Melbourne Central and it's 50-50 Asian tourists and hipster Zoomers with Macbooks that want to pretend they're in New York; either way, they just view the brand as some quirky novelty), nor is it the competition from cheap espresso (7-11 didn't launch their dollar coffees until 2013, and Coles Express was maybe a year after that) - it's the fact we already had an established coffee culture and Starbucks' product fundamentally fails to conform to what our idea of a "real" coffee is.

They could sell their drinks for $1 at 7-11 and people would still buy the standard lattes.

As a coffee enthusiast I wonder what the definition of "really high quality" is here. For me the coffee bean needs to be well roasted (most/all big brands roast too hot to save time and burn the bean. Starbucks too, they cover it with milk and lots of sugar), freshly grinded before brewing and made with a portafilter. No full automatic coffee machine I used produced high quality coffee, at best acceptable coffee, usually nearly undrinkable office caffeine shots.

While Starbucks coffee isn't top quality coffee, it still beats your usual office space full automatic poison by a long shot and is readily available everywhere. That's why it's considered good coffee by many.

I'm curious, how do you find Starbucks and McDonald's coffee compare? I find McDonald's coffee superior, though I prefer the ambience of Starbucks.

I'm not the parent, but McDonald's coffee in the US is far superior to Starbucks for typical drip coffee. The flip side is that Starbucks has more options than McDonalds for coffee drinks.

> Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1

7-11 or Coles Express coffee do not have high quality coffee. Everyone I know who drinks it does so just because it's convenient.

(OK, fair. It's of course not "really high-quality" compared to the top-grade stuff where they roast the beans in-house and all. It is surprisingly good, though, and comparable in quality to many smaller cafes.)

There are petrol station machines in France and Italy that make better coffee than Starbucks too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com