I like Starbucks. I've been to number one at Pike's Place in Seattle, and I drink their brew several times each week. It seems to me that the locations which are dedicated, sole occupancy coffee shops, are always good.
Lately there is a move toward placing Starbucks inside supermarkets in Tennessee. Well, I have now bought coffee from three of them. Harriman is just the latest, and I confess, if that's the way Starbucks is going, I will be spending more time at Panera.
The staff is perhaps not quite so rigorously vetted in their supermarket outlets. The chocolate cake was dry. I had had a similar experience at another Kroger Starbucks (Springfield TN) so I had specifically asked if the cake was fresh and nice. "Yes" came the reply. Bad guess; she was wrong...it was crappy!
But it's a coffee shop. So how was the coffee? Well, it seems their forte is latte, sans froth, avec burned milk. That's schoolboy French for 'four bucks worth of bloody awful'.
Kroger may be at the lower end of modern supermarkets, but Starbucks shouldn't take that as license to drop their famous, high standards.
400 miles, one stop for coffee and I had to pick Starbucks at Kroger in Harriman. Mistake! read more