Starbucks: A Love Story

Let's get this out of the way right now. I live in a Starbucks. I sit here everyday, I attend classes I go someplace for lunch and I return here to write. This may lend me a certain sort of bias, as I know many people have a "problem" with Starbucks. It's one of the reasons I decided to write this at all in fact.

Starbucks is an evil corporate entity. It forces smaller coffee shops to close their doors and crushes them beneath it java flavored heel. But even those who vehemently hate the Empire of Coffeee, you have to say...they really aren't that bad as far as Evil Empires go.

If Starbucks were as evil as some claim it to be, then why do so many people continue to go? Detractors will shout that it ruins the "home" environment of the smaller coffee enterprises, and that their weird sizes only prove to confuse and set themselves as being better than any other producer of coffee.

Well, I'll agree with you on the sizes. I've never quite got a handle on that. As for the home environment, I can't say anything I've heard anything less true. Just as not ever coffee-shop is the same, neither is every Starbucks, each one has it's own environment and feel depending on the workers.

The Starbucks I sit in is entirely built to get people in and out as fast as possible, the shop used to be a train store and is built like a walk-in version of a drive through. Yet I stay here, why is that? I do that because the staff are excellent.

I don't like every Starbucks, just like I don't like every coffee shop. I'm not say Starbucks is any better or worse than any other coffee shops out there. What I am saying however is this, It's a place like any other. Unless you yell at every large company for doing what they do, why yell at this one?

Instead focus on a place you feel comfortable in. Fall in love with the floors, and the scents and that one table that rocks with un-even legs. Just because it's an Empire, doesn't mean some of the provinces in it, the little stores themselves can't be places to fall in love with.