Starbucks derives much (if not most) of their success from product positioning. It's no secret their coffee is just meh in comparison to any other coffee shop. People frequent Starbucks because they love the brand. A lot of things comprise a brand. The logo, the music, the smell, the brown tiled floor, the atmosphere, and yes, the wifi they offer.

If Starbucks partners with Google it isn't really a play to make the free-loaders more comfortable from an operations standpoint, it is about improving their brand image. Once you know they have faster wifi, it will be one more aspect of the brand that you are drawn to, even if it isn't to use the wifi. It may sound absurd, but I believe this is more of a marketing play than actually improving the customer experience.

Starbucks coffee is actually pretty darn good. Sure, if you live in SF, Seattle, Portland, or New York City, you have access to niche coffee shops that can really do better. But objectively speaking, Starbucks coffee is really about 90% as good. And for the rest of the country it _really_ raised the quality of coffee. 20 years ago you got bitter swill anywhere except the above trailblazing cities. Today you can get a properly pulled espresso with perfectly microfrothed whole milk anywhere in the country, which is a pretty mean feat. In a decade or two we've hit Italian levels of coffee quality.

> But objectively speaking, Starbucks coffee is really about 90% as good.

"Objectively speaking" about a matter of taste is always improper.

But coffee quality is not strictly a matter of taste.

"good/bad" quality is completely subjective.

There may be objective qualities that have statistical correlations to people's "good/bad" assessments, but that doesn't stop "good" and "bad" from being subjective.

quality is not completely subjective...sorry.

Ehh, nearly every city I've been to with a population over ~20k has had noticeably better coffee in at least one local spot. It's not just the major cities. But yes, comparing the average cup of coffee before/after Starbucks got big is a night-and-day comparison.

I just wish everyone wouldn't try to taste like Starbucks, now. They can't do it half as well as Starbucks does, so you just get worse everything.

Perhaps. But with Starbucks I know exactly what I'm going to get. I know I'll have decent wifi. I know I can sit there and use it all day long.

When I travel, I look for Starbucks. It's just the safest bet to know I'm going to get work done that day.

I agree. My favorite is Philz, but even compared to that I would say Starbucks is at least 90% good. I would even go further to say that their Americano is sometimes better than a lot of what those hipster-famous coffee shops serve (but it's subjective because i don't like tangy flavor)

I don't think I've ever lived in a city that doesn't offer at least one better option. To me Starbucks is just a safe bet. If I'm in a new town and in a rush its a guaranteed commodity. Their mixed drinks are pretty good, but that's because they are so loaded down with sugar and syrups you can't taste the coffee. I usually avoid them since I'm not one for sweets. Their straight black drip is below bar. It used to be laughably bad but a couple years ago they made a serious effort to improve it.

To me they are like Wendy's. Yeah, not the best, but not bad. I can do better at home or if I know the area... but that's not always the case.

I usually avoid being subjective, but Starbucks coffee is pretty bad, and most of their barista are hardly knowledgeable about coffee. Once, I asked for an espresso to stay, and it took them 5 long minutes to find an espresso cup. (I can't handle drinking espresso in an americano cup to go.) And talk about grinding.

Anyway, I live in NYC and as you said, there are plenty of local coffee shops with awesome coffee (Gregory's, Kaffee 1668, grounded), so I can't complain. But it'd be terrific if Google could support these better coffee shops instead of just following the masses, because they provide a much better experience.

FWIW, every hip college town I have been to had multiple coffee shops that were better than Starbucks. You don't have to live in a large metropolis.

> Italian levels of coffee quality.

Interestingly, Italians, from what I can tell, are not "coffee snobs" at all. They drink espresso, cappuccino, macchiato, etc... and just expect it to be pretty good, but I've never seen people discuss it much, like you might with wine.

I don't drink the stuff at all, so have no opinion on the quality anywhere.

"My phone is always auto-connecting to attwifi but it ends up paralyzing my phone because nothing works until I go to the browser and agree to their terms."

"Say hello to my little friend", which neatly encapsulates how I feel about stupid web login screens on wifi and exactly how I feel each time this app bypasses them for me:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.syslynx....

aka "Wifi web login". Can be a bit touchy with some but I've not found one yet that it doesn't eventually work on. Once configured, it just transparently sits in the background, at work, or restaurants, or the library, or pretty much anywhere.

I would imagine there exists an iDevice work-alike.

Unfortunately for us iDevice users, invisible background tasks like that are a no-go. Apple simply won't let you ship an app that sits around and invisibly logs you in like that.

Fortunately, iOS itself is smart enough to notice when your network has a login page like that, and will display that page on-screen automatically so you can click through it. Not as smooth as that Android app (which I'm now jealous of), but at least things don't invisibly fail until you figure out what's going on.

Fortunately, for everyone (Android and iDevice), 802.11u, aka "Hotspot 2.0" neatly solves the problem by doing away with c(r)aptive portals.

802.11u is supported today on some Android phones, and has been (yes,publicly) announced for iOS 7.

Good to hear. Our long nightmare will finally end someday.

It's likely going to get much, much worse. Try to sign in to Starbucks wifi in Italy & much of continental Europe.

That's the future, sadly - Italy for one requires you to register with your passport or other ID in order to access free wiki. It's an anti terrorism measure. Every hotel you stay at requires you to sign on individually, in a manner connected to you personally, every single time.

Holy cow! Seriously? You cannot use the internet, at all, without it being tied to a real-life ID?

Wow... you're the Friday Q&A Mike Ask. Aloha!

Hello!

> Do they really want to encourage the people who sit there all day on laptops?

Presumably they do. Sure there are arguments against it, but on the pro side: if people are going to spend a day on their laptop, do you want them buying your drinks every X minutes/hours, or do you want them elsewhere?

If you have their combination loyalty/prepaid card and make more than 5 purchases on it a year, you get free refills on brewed coffee during a visit (so long as you bought the first cup with the card).

So they actually don't mind if you come in and order the cheapest cup of coffee they have, camp on a table all day, and keep coming back to the counter for free refills. They just care that you do it often, and that you minimize their credit card fees when you do it.

They pretty much treat that refills as equal as actual paid refills ($0.50) and they won't even know you are getting free refill until they scan the card, too.

Of course, if they know you enough, they'll eventually figure it out by looking at your face.

Only store I had a problem was in Nacogdoches, TX -- somehow, they didn't allow refills -- citing some health law disallowing it , so I guess it can vary by store.

Since almost all stores are owned by Starbucks (some stores in airports and malls are not corp. stores), shouldn't they have a clear, firm wide policy?

For all the store I've visited before, other than indirect operation stores, pretty much have very consistent policies regarding pretty much every aspect of their operations.

The one store I was treated differently (which was a direct operation store) was little surprising to me, but might have been something to do with bizarre laws in their local jurisdiction, in which case they wouldn't have much choice.

It could have been better if they could accommodate me somehow, though...

Stronger argument against this is they'll lose customers due to lack of seating space.

I've spent hours in a few different Starbucks in the south bay before. My observation has been that most people either get their order and leave, or stick around for an hour+. The number of people who sit down just long enough to eat a muffin or something is pretty small.

Why is that argument stronger? You think Starbucks hasn't run the numbers/experiments to test whether a warm body on a laptop is better than the same body ducking in and out? I would bet money they have done a frightening amount of analysis on this question.

Also, to your specific point - when people choose restaurants they often go where there's a crowd (the food must be good here), not to an empty restaurant. The situation is a little different because Starbucks is so pervasive, but don't discount the customer draw of a bustling store full of people.

I'm not sure.

Over the years just kind of casually observing the placement and layout of the stores, it seems that they are maximized to be easy to access by the morning rush crowds as well as the lunch and after work rushes. Also, a pronounced increase in drive-through locations.

I could imagine that the majority of a location's revenue comes from walk-in/out business during peak times, and the tables could stay full with little rotation all day without appreciable impact on revenue, while solidifying the chain as a go-to "third place", especially for the business class.

Any former employees here to chime in?

i'm guessing there are very few people who go to starbucks, see the seating area is full, and leave. If they're already there, they're going to buy something. If it is busy they might order and then go to a nearby park or something, but once they're at the door they're pretty much a guaranteed sale.

On the other hand, they'll look busy and popular.

I hope that Google finds a smart workaround for the need to login on a web-browser - it is an annoyance every time I walk by a Starbucks.

There are a lot of subtle ways of regulating how long customers stay. In recent years, I've seen Starbucks replace cushy chairs with stools and rigid chairs that most people wouldn't want to spend more than 20 minutes in. I've seen more than a few restaurants block off wall sockets. And music can be effective at dissuading loiterers without them being too aware of it - even innocuous coffeehouse stuff can be fatiguing after so long.

"Starbucks? The internet sucks there. Let's just go to..."

Yup. When I travel, I look for a Starbucks when I need to get online (or want to get a coffee and space out on Facebook for a little while). That can't be an altogether bad thing to have people associate with your brand.

It might be that it wasn't really Starbucks' initiative and that it's rather Google who wants you to surf on their infrastructure.

If you remember their business model:

1. Own as many web properties and infrastructure (fiber, etc.) as possible

2. With that, get all the data you can on the user

3. This allows you to build the most precise profiles on users

4. Which in turn leads (besides the benefits for the NSA) to an optimal targeting of their ads (their main cash cow)

5. This leads to the highest margins/cash flow

(1) conflates services and infrastructure, which is sloppy / oversimplified.

Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. The infrastructure is primarily there to ensure that folks use the net more overall (and by extension, its services.)

That's not necessarily a bad thing: in return for a service you want to use, you're being shown ads targeted at you. To ensure you consume those services, they're made easy to access.

I wouldn't be too surprised if Google analyzed their traffic and discovered that a lot of people were getting frustrated while logged into Google properties due to slow, crappy connections in Starbuckses, and decided to solve that problem once and for all.

Starbucks is, from Google's perspective, a major ISP with somewhat poor service that's very concentrated geographically. That last part means it's very cheap to just swoop in and spend the money to solve the problem definitively.

I have no idea if this is actually the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google has decided that they're losing $BIGNUM from bad connections at Starbucks, and that it'll only cost $BIGNUM/2 to solve it with brute force.

> Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly.

That may be the case mainly in the past. But with technology evolving, I do think it's tempting to go further and extract valuable data from network traffic as well, which in turn can be used to create an even more precise picture of the user.

Perhaps. But that's speculation about the future, which needs to be separated from the current facts. Don't blame people for things they haven't done yet.

Well on the flip side they've been removing outlets and quietly replacing workspace-ready tables with shorter cafe tables that are hard to work for a long period of time on. So while the wifi would be "faster" the starbucks itself isn't conducive to a work session that would last longer than an hour or two

I'm sure they can/will monetize it once it impacts their bottomline. Like charging on time spent in shop or seat reservation charges.

Starbucks has had free wifi for years. I think it's safe to assume they've figured out the business model.

If it's running faster, won't people be able to finish whatever it is they want to do faster?

My experience is probably not typical (I move around a lot and rarely go to the same Starbucks more than a few times) but I'm only about 70% sure that any given Starbucks will have a connection at all. So I only go in if it's really convenient or I have no other options. That's to say nothing of the speed or reliability - both of which are typically mediocre to terrible.

If I knew with certainty that every Starbucks had a fast and reliable connection, I'd probably patronize them 50-100% more than I currently do. Hell, I'd be on my way out of this hotel in search of a Starbucks right now if I knew that!