Starbucks is reeling as customers go elsewhere, sales decline

They should try making good coffee

Why would you go to Starbucks if another local coffee shop was nearby? Their coffee is fine, but it loses taste tests to McDonald's. They're anti union. They're too expensive. You can usually get a better coffee elsewhere.

Starbucks, do you remember when the German government lowered the VAT in July 2020 for restaurants when COVID hit us? The intention was to make food cheaper for the consumer to prevent restaurants from going bankrupt.

That’s the month you increased your prizes to sell your stuff for the same prize including VAT as before and making more profit, giving your customers a huge middle finger.

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Good. I hope every single company that took advantage of the inflation by raising prices to the fucking moon goes under.

Started going to a small local coffee shop a little over two years ago, and I'll never go back to the giant chains. The people working are always happy, greet regulars by name, always go out of their way to interact or talk with me- usually remember something we talked about before, comp my orders every now and then, host little events, etc. It's not just them either - I always have a way better experience going to non-chain coffee places. Oh, and the coffee is always waay better and priced better.

We raised or prices and consumers stopped buying! What is the invisible hand of the market doing? We were promised everlasting growth!

Only down 3%? I was hoping more. Still, fuck em. Maybe fewer consumers want to pay out the nose for a cup of flavored sugar with coffee?

First McDonald's and now Starbucks. Cool. Screw em.

We are laughing at your misfortune, you fucking ghouls

Honestly, it wasn't the $7 coffee that turned me away from starbucks. It was the $7 coffee that taste like toilet water, when there are no shortage of local, cheaper coffee shops with amazing brews made by people who actually want to be there, who also won't be fired for unionizing.

For granted, there's no shortage of coffee shops in my city. Locally operated and owned, and they have better coffee at better prices. Starbucks isn't even a reasonable choice with so many better options available.

Good

I suggest a community owned and operated service where we can offer Starbucks and McDonald's words of support during these especially difficult times..

But exactly because the times are difficult for them right now, WE CAN CHARGE THEM SURGE PRICING for the supportive messages!!! Let's also fire conduct an employment status reassignment activity for 60% of the human message writer workforce and replace them with AI and cheap offshore call centers!!! Also, let's sell our now collected sadness data on Starbucks and McDonald's to our third party partners like Kleenex so that they can also charge them surge prices for tissues as we have reliable data to show that they are crying right now!!!

I started boycotting Starbucks when I learned they had partnered with Nestle for store-bought products - their Sumatra and Komodo Dragon coffees were pretty good.

I send an email every year or so to let them know, since boycotts aren't effective if the group being boycotted doesn't know why, with predictably apathetic responses.

Anyway, if you're a no-Nestle person then Starbucks is on the list...

Watching them trying to bust unionization efforts in their shops just totally turned me off the brand. I haven’t been into one of their shops or bought any of their products at retail since.

At this point I’ve found better local places but mostly I just got used to making my own iced coffee and it would be silly to bother going back.

Personally I resent how they redefine sizes.

I want a coffee I don't want to have to read in English to twat translation guide to be able to order one.

I stopped going there when I realized it's all just sugar. All the yummy drinks are just sugar.

My husband and I started going to the co-op and getting fancy coffee beans and make drip coffee each morning. Cheaper, just as delicious (if not even better), and we don't have to go out

Good! I boycott Starbucks because of their underhanded business practices.

Outside of North America, same-store sales slid 7%. In China, Starbucks’ second-largest market, same-store sales tumbled 14% as both average ticket and transactions shrank. Starbucks has faced stiffer competition in China from local coffee shops that undercut the coffee giant on price.

And that is the problem. Starbucks is not offering anything that doesn't already exist. It pretends to be a coffee shop for the upper class because it sounds "sophisticated" to say grande instead of medium.

I no longer go there. I know local coffee shops that offer a much better selection of coffees at a good price. And their atmosphere is authentic.

The longtime running critique of Starbucks was that they were already an expensive luxury. Why push it and try to raise prices even further? That takes some serious delusion.

Are we going elsewhere or are we just too broke to grab a $7 coffee every day?

The only time I ever go to Starbucks now is if I'm traveling and don't want to stop and run in somewhere and it's the only real option at the exit.

Their coffee is god-awful and always has been.

I will always go to local places before Starbucks. And even if I don't want to get out of my car, local places with drive-throughs are becoming pretty common now. There's several here. There's a guy in a small town nearby who owns a tiny drive-up kiosk with a Starbuck's on one side of town and another chain called Biggby's being built on the other side of town. I talked to him about whether or not he's worried. He's not. He has a ton of loyal customers and offers a bunch of stuff that the others don't, like a huge number of smoothie flavors and multiple types of cake you can get slices from. There's even a fresh vegetable stand a friend with a farm set up next to the kiosk so you can get some fresh produce after you get coffee if you're so inclined.

Fast food is where the pushback is beginning. Consumers NEED to push back on greed-flation for things to change, especially in areas of elastic demand. Hopefully, this trend continues and the companies react the right way (I know, that’s overly optimistic)

Omg, the consequences of all the giant corporations inflating prices for the last 4 years

The real surprise is how burnt coffee every became popular in the first place

My local cafes are just better, and they’re just as close as Starbucks. It’s not that they aren’t busy, their sales just aren’t growing and shareholders don’t like it when the line doesn’t go up.

Americans learning why Starbucks struggles overseas. I'm guessing the maturity of small coffee shops has caught up to the rest of us, so better coffee at better pricing is more abundant.

1. expensive
2. better alternatives abound
3. corporate has questionable morality

Isn’t this because they were supporting Israel?

The other day I was walking around, thinking about all the different coffee shops I could see, and wondering why people waste their money on starbucks and their burnt-ass coffee.

The Starbucks in my area removed all their seating. I would go for the 3rd space aspect but they got rid of it.

First McDonald's falling sales. Now Starbucks falling sales. Hmm.... I wonder if there's a trend going on here.

I haven't gone to Starbucks for a regular coffee since they changed to only serving Pike's Place Roast (like 10+ years ago).

It should tell them something when you go to the grocery store, Starbucks is on sale, and they are out of Breakfast Blend, House Blend, and Veranda Blend, but they have full shelves of fucking Pike's. There are several gas station brand coffees better than that swill.

How much of this is a combination of Gen Z being health conscious, and getting old enough to to have to start paying for things themselves instead of having an personal expense budget like when they were in high school or university?

I live in Seattle so I'm obviously not going to visit them when their are a dozen good small cafés within a stone throw of any Starbucks. On the few occasions that I have been there recently, the specialty drinks (I drink the occasional latte) are terrible. That should not be surprising since they are made by minimum wage teenagers. The food is crap. All of it is overpriced.

Also, fuck Howard Schulz.

Starbucks used to be a pretty decent place. I mean, your preference for how the coffee tasted aside…they used to have newspapers, magazines, couches and other comfy furnishings, nice seating, the pastries were fresh, pretty damn good, and there was a decent variety. Decent coffee-making merch for sale, too. Their menu was coffee and espresso drinks. None of this choco-frosted-sugar-ice-bomb with coffee as an afterthought - if there’s any in the drink at all.

Now? Cheap-ass furniture that invites you to take your coffee and gtfo. Buy a mug or insulated plastic drink glass. Pastries? Let’s pop those out of a plastic bag. Coffee? Minimal. Now it’s the aforementioned sugary drinks or other fruity drinks that have no coffee at all. There is no reason to go there unless your diabetes needs a challenge.

Literally the only thing keeping me buying Starbucks is the loyalty app that gets me a free bag of coffee a couple times a year. Otherwise I’d go elsewhere. Once the loyalty program stops paying out, I’m gone.

Their prices are so expensive. Corporate executives do whatever they need to in order to increase profits right now, even if it destroys a customer base.

Starbucks also often don't have bathrooms anymore. Starbucks used to be a place you could go to, sit down, use a bathroom if you wanted, use the Internet, and then buy something reasonably priced if you felt like it, but also just be there without buying anything.

Now they want KYC through an App before you buy a $20 Latte so you can get a QR code in the App to use a bathroom, if they have one. The enshitification is real and then they are shocked-gasp, shocked!-that fewer people are there. "Why don't they like the QR Codes?"

Lol

Delonghi bean to cup machine has paid for itself £10 of beans a month I have an an aero press at work. It's ruined the thought of paying anything more than£2 for a coffee

I like some things from Starbucks, but ever since the manager tore into an autistic girl for having the gall to have boundaries while being sexually harassed, I stopped going. I even reported that POS manager to the DM. Fuck that guy. Girl did nothing wrong and got shit on for "not reporting it the right way", "not working it out like an adult", and "being mean". FFS, the person she was training was the damn poster child for Sexual Harassment and she told him no, she did not want to be touched nor hit on.

I much prefer my local coffee shops, but they are all ~15 minutes away. Only one of them has a decent amount of seating with outlets. The rest are small and don't really accommodate people who want to work for a few hours, which is the main reason I am going to a coffee shop in the first place. The only close one was that Starbucks.

Traffic to its U.S. stores fell again [...] dropping 6%. Domestic same-store sales fell 2%, boosted by an increase in average ticket.

So they had less people come in, and their response was to raise prices.

Last quarter, executives discussed plans to revive the lagging U.S. business that included leaning on discounts

Ah, yes, temporarily lower prices that you'll need to install their tracking app for, I'm sure. They'll use it to dial in the price-point at which each customer is willing to buy, offer "discounts" to just above that price, and then boil-the-frog until it reaches a price acceptable to corporate ...

I just doing drink coffee so that solves that problem. The last time I went to a Starbucks was when I was on vacation in Florida in 2012

I like good tea, not coffee.

So, you know, I have technically always been boycotting Starbucks I guess.

If people really want a caffeine and sugar fix I can't wait till someone tries a chain of yerba mate places. North America is gonna be wired.

Starbucks gives me apple fanboy vibes..

I have learnt coffee oxidizes quite fast giving that horrible burnt taste, which even milk won't hide. The longer it has been in a open-to-air-pot, the worse the taste gets. Storing in an air-tight container (thermos) it stays "ok" for days. So actually, I think all such servings from the coffee shops are thus inherently worse than brewing your own coffee.

(There are no starbucks in my country, but I think McDonald's coffee really is somehow heated past 100*C and it's the first sip away to burn your mouth, so you wouldn't taste it anyway.)