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Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

How can Starbucks be so popular with such terrible coffee? Why McDonalds still profitable in Italy and other places famous for great food?

I'm actually surprised Domino's wasn't a success. There's something about the network effect and fast delivery that makes these projects thrive.

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Because the coffee you get at Starbucks is not the kind of coffee you can find at a typical bar and that we use to drink for breakfast or after lunch. It's a completely different market.

McDonald's doesn't have a local equivalent (it used to exist, and they got bought up by McDonald's[0]) so it doesn't have the same local (and better) competition that Domino's has, especially on a dish Italian people feel strongly about.

So basically, three completely different situations.

[0] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghy

Starbucks is popular in North America. However, they had to shut shop in Australia precisely because there was high quality coffee available everywhere and nobody wanted to put up with the rubbish Starbucks was feeding.

> Why McDonalds still profitable in Italy and other places famous for great food?

Because McDonalds is cheap, fast, and tastes good. Seems obvious. They haven't sold billions of Big Macs because they taste terrible, no matter how much food snobs would like to pretend otherwise.

Even if you have "great food" sometimes you want a change. Something that might be "great food" to a tourist can be boring to a local.

Coffee is mostly terrible in Italy. Even Starbucks might be better than the median. McDonalds is junk food - everybody sometimes craves that and it has little tradition in Italy. But pizza? Italy is so traditional with food that its hard to find anything else than pasta and pizza. So Dominos was competing with like 50% of all food vendors.

"Coffee is mostly terrible in Italy"

say what?

Might be it's just not something we are used to in NZ/AU - in Italy you get like 20ml of espresso or if it's cappuccino it's something like 50ml. Quality will be ok. But I can't remember getting 100-200ml drink (i.e. cortado, flat white) for longer enjoyment.

Lol. Tried coffee in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Netherlands, USA, Mexico... Only decent coffee was made by italian machines. Starbucks coffee is pure shit compared to an average italian one, literally very hot garbage water.

I don't know about Italy. I was in Poland for couple days, and we decided to check if Starbucks is any good - we've ordered filter, espresso, and few kinds of coffee with milk. It's the most disgusting coffee you can ever find, and costs higher than any other cafe. I just don't get it.

McDonald in Italy is quite different than US one, tried both. First time I went to an italian McD was 27yo in Bologna and it was terrible, now quality improved a lot, much better than McD I went in US.

Different categories of items. Starbucks is fine for syrupy dessert delivery mechanism. McDonalds is new category done well enough. But with pizza in Italy you need to compete with multiple similar options in same category. Dough with some toppings and even optionally cheese or not cheese and tomato or not tomato on top of it. Reasonably good products, with reasonable prices with reasonable availability.

For growing chain competing with anything is hard.

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