In April, I bought an espresso maker and renewed my love for coffee. This was after spending 3 weeks of my Spring in San Francisco drinking great coffee and another 2 weeks in Europe also drinking great coffee…coffee that wasn’t brewed by Starbucks. I went to Starbucks a total of 15 times in 2014 and each time I felt like I was in a McDonalds.Starbucks’ minimally trained ‘push-button’ baristas across the world who know little about coffee and spend 6 of their 8 hours making 800 calorie instal-lattes in a cup were dead to me.
I made pour-over and espresso for the rest of 2014 and found cafes in my travels that weren’t Starbucks that were making much better coffee. I’ll still visit the coffee-giant but there’s no way I’ll be able to attain my Gold-Status going forward, nor does it really matter because Gold Rewards used to be great and now it’s only great if you visit the store a LOT.