Starbucks II

Here I am writing about Starbucks again; there are a couple of comments from the last time and I have had a few private emails too; I didn't know Starbucks stirred up so much passion.

So this is a short post as a kind of retort!

I have no problems with Starbucks at all and I don't blame them for not paying their corporation tax either; I am not going to be the one to throw the first stone. If the government here wait till now to question the leaders of the big international companies about their shortfall in tax payments they are even more stupid than I thought.

I don't know how long Starbucks have been over here as I was living in Los Angeles but when I first went there in August 1994 they were very well established.

In a country which doesn't look after its citizens – health care wise – it was good to know that there was a company which gave their employees free health care!

Starbucks is not well liked by everybody either here or in America; it is thought that it is a bit snobby and expensive.

In America the coffee is very cheap – maybe about 60p a cup - and you get free refills. It's very annoying to get back here when you go out for breakfast and you have to keep ordering your coffee and paying for it as you eat. The waiters hover with 2 pots of coffee – the orange one is decaf – and they refill as they pass your table.

In Starbucks you pay for each cup – unless you have proper filter coffee which is what I drink - even here I get free refills; that's only for the proper filter coffee I reiterate. But the staff are very nice; they are friendly and try to please. I know there will be branches were you will meet the opposite but I haven't found any yet.

Over here I have been to a Starbucks at Liverpool Street Station where, if they moved out tomorrow, you wouldn't know they had been there. All the fixtures and fittings in the old building are still in place.

Before I went away Wardour Street was the film centre in London; there were film companies, cutting rooms, post production houses etc and then they moved out and the tee-shirt and souvenir shops moved in – now I am back there is a Starbucks and loads of other coffee shops and sandwich bars which I prefer to tee shirts.

I go to Starbucks every day here – well nearly every day. One of the days I noticed an old man who came in, ordered his drink, then sat down, took his newspaper out, and did the crossword; 20 years ago he would have been in the pub taking a drink.

They never kick you out of Starbucks for not buying drinks. Students and school children come in and use the free wi-fi. The other day a woman came in, bought herself a drink, curled herself up on one of the armchairs and read her book. She had dropped her child off to a birthday party and waited in Starbucks in the warm and comfort.

There are also sofas scattered about so it is a new experience and a comfortable way to drink coffee.

Before I went to America it was quite possible to buy a good cup of coffee here – sometimes they would call it 'drip coffee' but since coming back proper coffee is hard to come by.

For some reason the Italians have taken over the expertise in coffee drinking; I read the other day that no Italian would take coffee after a certain hour in the morning – so what? The largest coffee drinking nation is the United States and they drink coffee all day.

In Britain there is a company called Costa – they don't serve filter coffee so I don't go there. They serve Americano which I won't bore you with again but they are a British Company owned by a brewery – Whitbread. They have branches in 30 countries, including Britain, but none in the United States whose national drink is a cup of joe (coffee) and I wonder if they pay local corporation tax in those countries?

By the way the coffee taster at Costa has his tongue insured with Lloyds of London for £10,000,000. Apparently he has 10,000 finely tuned taste buds. Here he is:

Gennaro Pelliccia