Maybe this is different in the suburbs but the one thing I notice when I walk into a city Starbucks is how little regard its patrons have for the store. The irony is that with its cushy chairs, open policy for bathrooms and free WiFi it's meant to feel like an office away from home but when you look around it feels like my college living situation. Forget a place where great minds can come together because of its liberal policy of allowing people to sit there all day means you have a bunch of near homeless people holding court
The bathrooms are some of the most disgusting in the city with a puddle of java colored piss separating every toilet-bowl from the door and the stink so strong it'll make your grande double vanilla latte taste like homeless ass. Their willingness to open their doors to anybody basically ensures it becomes the bathing spot for the filthy since you don't even have to buy a coffee to use the bathrooms. If you are a hobo it's a great deal but if you just spent $5 on a coffee, at some point feel like you are subsidizing the bladderly challenged. This is where those liberal northwesterners have it all wrong.
it goes deeper than just the free bathrooms, Starbucks is a prime example of what kind of ownership people feel they have in a welfare state. It starts with these filthy bathrooms which have left these stores looking and feeling so ratty that it's normal paying patrons start to treat it like their own personal garbage dump. Maybe people feel that because they spent $5 on a cup of coffee they think it should come with maid service or maybe they see that nobody else cares to keep it up either so why should they.
It is shocking how often you walk past one of its tables and see it covered with empty coffee cups, crumbs and dirty napkins. It is obvious that there isn't any table service so I don't see where exactly people get this belief that people should be cleaning up after them; people look around and see that everybody else gets away with it, so why should they bother. you don't see this is McDonalds or Wendy's but somehow Starbucks attracts a highly messy crowd.
The problem is that the eventually the image and brand gets killed because of this, who wants to spend the equivalent of the price for lunch for a coffee and then feel like you can't even make it into the bathroom without wearing waders.
Yeah for now you have enough rich guys willing to drop $25 per week to keep it running but when they wise up and start putting their money in Swiss coffee where does it leave those bathroom hanger-ons?
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