As the possibility of making a good living from growing coffee beans recedes, many farmers have increased their production of coca leaves instead. These leaves are then used to make cocaine.

Of course, the farmers don’t themselves produce the end-product (no more than they produce your Starbucks venti mocha), but they do produce the raw material from which the end product is made.

Coca (but not cocaine) has been grown and used in the Andes for a looooooong time. Hard to see too many coffee growers getting into the cocaine production side of things and a pretty insensitive juxtaposition…

[/posted from Starbucks in Lima, Peru. Definitely an aspirational brand here. Definitely a better cup of coffee than nescafe (Crystal’s point). Starbucks in Peru also has free wireless—a distinct improvement on the American version.]

To be honest, though, KFC has always been much, much more popular in China than McDonalds. A taste for fried chicken is universal.

(I’ll also note that McD is China isn’t expensive by Western standards – it was $2.50 US for a value meal last time I was there. The portions are also a bit smaller than in the US, the workers almost all have some college and get paid twice what a local restaurant worker would make, and the menu is filled with non-American items like the “triangle wrap”.)

In a similar vein to John B, I suggest you weren’t looking closely enough. Apart from Costa and Caffe Nero, there have always been numerous coffee/lunchtime sandwich places doing decent coffee (I’m told – not a coffee drinker myself).

But here’s something no one has touched on yet – the tea in Starbucks is disgusting . I have to deal with it weekly on Tuesdays because their comfty sofas and friendly mother-and-baby-group atmosphere. For gawdsake though, I wish they’d just buy some bog standard tea bags instead of pushing that Tazo crap.

My brother runs a non-Starbucks coffeehouse now (Bipartisan Cafe, 79th and SE Stark, Portland, OR, USA, a Stumptown affiliate, be sure to go there!) but spent ten years at Starbucks. He believes that Starbucks coffee is superior to a lot of the independent-coffeehouse coffee because a lot of the independents aren’t really coffee buffs and put out an inconsistent product. (But Stumptown is best of all.)

Starbucks management is superefficient in ways that are both good and bad. Management training sessions are cultish and creepy, and Starbucks basically has an “up or out” philosophy for managers, but they treat the low-level employees better than almost anyone does. It’s been a long time since their money was made mostly on coffee and pastries; I think that most of their profit comes from coffeemakers and other merchandise.

That’s a weird coincidence; I once got thrown out of a Starbucks for the same reason.

There was indeed a small and iconoclastic Starbucks inside the Imperial Palace in Beijing, but was closed last year because of it was undermining solemnity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6898629.stm

And just as Starbuck’s coffee is not what one might find in Milan, American (and Japanese) pizza is not what one would find in Naples, and American bagels are not what one would have found on the Lower East Side in 1920. It suits us.