It’s weird, but in 2002 I could always find one person working at a McDonald’s in Haidian who spoke English, but come back in 2007, that was no longer the case. Starbucks was the same, I think those places just decided that English wasn’t important anymore. Now, Shanghai is much better than Beijing, I was shocked when even a taxi driver spoke English to me, and even the no name corner store they could often converse a bit, something that just would never happen in Beijing.