demontop
join:2001-08-21
Chicago, IL
 ·AT&T DSL Service
| reply to Derspankster
Re: Who needs $8 coffee anyway?
I always tell people, there's no such thing as "FREE Wi-Fi" - you just pay for it in some other way.
And the coffee part of a latte or mocha probably still is 89 cents - in 1970's or 1980's dollars, and you're also forgetting steamed milk, which is 85-90% of the drink. Farm subsidies might help farmers, but they don't help the american milk-drinking public, that's for sure.
I love how people conflate the price of coffee so readily to the mystical $5, even though you have to add a bunch of crap to it to get it into that price range, even after the 10.75% sales tax here in Chicago. Why not strap a pair on and just drink straight-up espresso shots if it's that big of a deal?
Back to the Wi-Fi - the plan is limiting starbucks card holders to 2 free hours per day to preserve bandwidth and table real-estate in busier stores, basically so a bunch of freeloader anarchist script kiddie types don't move in to the cozy corner starbucks and spend all day downloading pirated material while sipping on free ice water. Apple is also heavily in bed with Starbucks lately, via iTunes, so I would expect to see some Apple/iTunes banner ads, popups, portal pages, etc. as part and parcel with the "free" access. |
