Starbucks has always seemed self-defeating to me. The original goal was to introduce coffee art to a consumer culture that was, at the time, fixated on Folger's. They've succeeded in moving people to believe that there's a lot more to coffee which has seriously expanded the market for the kind of high-craft coffee possible at smaller, non-franchise shops. Today, Starbucks doesn't really have the brand to move into that niche, everyone knows their secret is just sugar and milk, so they need to stealthily make inroads.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, franchise and craft don't go together that well.

I remember reading an article about a certain kind of highly engineered coffee maker. It combined the grinder, water heater, mixer, and press all into one and thus turned perfect coffee into an exactly repeatable formula. A trained operator can never fail to please and Starbucks bought the company hoping to put one of those devices in every franchise and revolutionize the availability of the "perfect cup".

In pilots the baristas still fill them with stale beans.