Getting hot coffee and tea out of a vending machine when it’s cold out is one of the best experiences of visiting Japan. Particularly since the machines are everywhere.
Nothing like going inside the observatory at the top and grabbing a piping hot bottle of Royal Milk Tea from a vending machine.
Great UI: there's a countdown to when your order is going to be ready, and while you're waiting the next person can also enter their order.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a purist though. But then again, probably most people aren't.
Let's not forget what you average cup of coffee was like in America before Starbucks came along.
It's true that Melbourne does have good coffee, but the city is basically an accidental reinvention of Seattle. But they don't know this since they haven't been to Seattle.
Generally I feel like people in the coffee production chain give too much credit to James Hoffman types and/or baristas with man buns and not any credit to the actual farmers.
As far as I know, it is thanks to immigrants from Italy that an admittedly good and wide-spread coffee culture has established in Melbourne, but I never felt that it stood out in how Australians perceive themselves.
Not Perth (the capital city) no .. but definitely Northbridge (suburb slightly north of the city centre) and Fremantle (port | harbour 'city' down river from Perth) beacuse they've been Italian strongholds for decades.
Both were known for coffee in the early 1980s.
In addition to hipsterism there is ubiquity: baristas in petrol stations, swimming pools, dog parks, the beach, the pub, everywhere!
Of course, the US has always had plenty of Italians - specifically in SF and NYC, where the rich ones gave us Nancy Pelosi and high end grocery stores, while the poor ones gave us all those mafia movies. I'm not sure if Seattle's coffee shops came from them; I always assumed it was just because the weather made everyone depressed.
With that said, there’s a very discernible difference in quality between a decent cafe coffee and a Starbucks coffee.
My heuristic is the size of the small takeaway cup. If the small size is 8oz, it’s almost a certainly going to be average.
But a lot of what has attracted Starbucks' huge audience has been their very milky, sweetened, flavoured beverages that end up not being much of a coffee by the time they're consumed, and I think when people scoff at Starbucks, that's a big part of what they're reacting to. But I do think people who just have very milky coffee like cafe latte and flat white but then diss Starbucks are mostly just being snobbish.
I'm from Melbourne Australia, which several people in this thread have commented about, and I know what people are talking about, both those who talk about the good coffee here and those who talk about the superiority complex we have developed about it. I can see it both ways. Starbucks didn't take off here, not because people thought it was "bad"; we just didn't need it, as people already had favourite cafes serving coffee they really liked, so there was no need to change.
But the modern-day, 3rd-wave coffee snobbery thing arose a few years after that. On the one hand, like everything Melbourne claims to be better at, it can be a bit eye-rolly. On the other hand, my favourite coffee these days is long macchiato (I developed the taste for it when spending time in Italy and marrying into an Italian-Australian family), and even in Melbourne it can be hit-and-miss finding a cafe that does a long-mac "right"; I don't mean to be snobby about it, it's just about how I like it having developed a taste for it over several years. But it does make a difference that cafes here do try very hard to achieve very high standards in the coffee they serve, and people here really appreciate it.