My family ran a local sandwich shop for years. Here’s the problem.
If this is downtown, the local sandwich shop isn’t even there, in part because Starbucks helped price them out of being able to rent. Every supermarket now has a sandwich counter too, so local sandwich shops don’t do well in shopping centers either. Fast food has slightly improved their quality over the years so that’s more competitors at the low end. And Subway, period.
You’re paying for the convenience at Starbucks and in some cases convenience is valuable. If you don’t care about time and can go out of your way to a local sandwich shop, you get better food for less.
Nobody goes to Starbucks for good coffee, they go because it's the same everywhere. Sometimes I want to go get a great coffee somewhere they know how to pull a decent shot, and sometimes I want brownish sugarmilk.
No, you could not be more wrong. We did not leave reddit just for the admins, we also hoped to leave low effort posts and outright lies behind, there's no karma here so what's even the point of OP?
I'd just like to point out that OP is either lying or has been scammed.
Starbucks have consistent pricing and the most expensive sandwich in the UK is £5.10, technically 5.25 for a plant based breakfast item, see here for full menu prices.
But people like getting angry at cost of living issues right now (understandably) so this will get hundreds of upvotes despite being a lie.
Still a stupid price for a crap sandwich. As I said in another reply, come to France and you will get the same thing for half the price. However, it will be nice (can you beat french bread? I think not)
I've clearly eaten too many lunches from food vendors (including SB) inside convention centers because I expected see maybe 2 slices of ham and 1 of cheese for $8 (in 2023 money). And maybe a lettuce leaf that is probably a recycled hot coffee sleeve dyed green.
And they served it to you on a Dixie paper plate? I call bullshit but idk why I'm even posting here because you just reposted this in pounds instead of dollars LOL
I went to Niagara falls the other day and they were selling $10 pizza slices, my wife got one. I went to the grocery store across the street, bought a large roll from the fresh baked ones. Got cheese ends and ham ends at the deli aisle, and grabbed salad cup. It cost me about $8 but I got a much better, massive sandwich compared to what my wife ate.
Tourist hot spots are insane. I was having a cup of coffee in a small cafe at St. Mark's Square in Venice and it was 6.50€ for the coffee and a 12€ cover charge. Rip-off.
People giving money to Starbucks only tells them they can continue to charge what they want. I've never been a customer because coffee gives me the shits, but I'm constantly amazed to hear what people are willing to pay for a single beverage. Most Starbucks drinkers pay what I would pay for an entire meal drink included for their one drink.
I've been to a Starbucks once in my life and that was in August of 2012. I have never been back since I never plan to go back. I absolutely do not understand the appeal.
It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.
Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :
"In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto."
Now I have to re-read snow crash. Such a great book.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
The parts I like are the attention to detail on the size of the bread being perfectly rectangular, the cheese slices being perfectly equally sized, and the consistently overlapping slices of ham that span the exact length of the bread. Then that all combines to form a shitty looking sandwich. Perfectly optimized sandwich designed by accountants.
Bought a cold sandwich at a quick-service place in England.
There's your problem. This one has a certain appeal, though. I'd pay eight pounds just to be spared the usual pile of cucumber slices, old egg, and obscene quantity of mayonnaise.
I too am impressed they managed to not include tomatoe, avocado, bacon, lettuce, or a sauce of any sort, while simultaneously not bothering to interlace the cheese between the meat for a more interesting texture profile.
I'm still firmly of the belief that if you're going to be having a cold sandwich for lunch than it should've been in your backpack and you should expect nothing but disappointment if you have somebody else make it.