The real reason why Starbucks coffee tastes so bad
Homogeneous lives and scalability!!
I went to Bangalore recently…went house hunting for a friend…he is just tired of the rising rents and so we decided to check out outer and new upcoming areas with a view to get cheaper rent apartments….
The Hunt Begins!!
We enter the first apartment building…it is a gated society with 5 tall towers..16 floors each with 4 flats on each floor….
When you enter any flat, it opens up to a small drawing room, which further opens up to a balcony…
On the right you have an alley which leads to 2 rooms on either side…One room has a balcony and a washroom attached to it..
There is a modular type of kitchen on the right and a small study on the left…
The floor has those shiny white tiles…the bathrooms have greyish tiles with frost glasses on the top which have markings on them..something on the lines No 2, Flat 2, Floor 6, Tower 2….
When you stand on the balcony, you get to either see the other flats or the swimming pool below…
Overall, it looked nice…
But we thought that we should check out more before taking a call…
The Hunt Carries on!!
So we enter another society…
We enter the flat and I go around to inspect it….it looks exactly the same as the last one…
We decide to check out the third…the same…
The fourth one…the exact same
Then it hit me..Even the flats I had seen in Gurgaon were the same….
Even on online platforms and listings, I had literally seen the same flats..there was hardly anything to distinguish them…I had to look through the listing details to figure out which city was this flat in…they all looked the freaking same…
It got me Thinking!!
What the hell happened to the uniqueness? What happened to creativity? What happened to the diversity…
I mean India was known to be diverse and changing every 100 kms..
Marketeers would use this excuse every time their shitty product or campaign didn’t work…
Well…globalization took over and scale took precedence over everything else….
Homogeneous Everything!!
The homogeneous culture was seeping in across all formats in our lives…our houses had become the same….experiences across cities had become the same…the same brewery, the same pub, the same mall….even the food was the same…
Infact, food was one thing that made each city unique…
I remember we friends used to go to a showarma place in Delhi everyday…small eatery by a roadside drain..amazing showarmas…now that same store has 10+ stores within the same market….gone is the unique taste…standardization and scale in place of uniqueness…
There was also this chole bhauture wala in Lajpat Nagar who would sell out by 1 pm…He suffered from the same scalability disease…
I have heard stories that the reason why Starbucks coffee tastes so bad is because they roast their coffee beans in such a manner that it looses all its taste. As a result, you get the same shitty and bland taste across the world in all their stores….
Do you feel the same or are there stories of silver linings in your experiences?