Plenty of independent coffee shops sell Lotus energy drinks for this exact reason.

To add to all this, if most of your customers are seriously there to taste their flavored syrups and milk of their favorite drink, you wouldn’t want to alter or even ruin that with unexpected, unique coffee flavors.

He just means “feature phone”

Dark Roasted coffee is the only way Starbucks can be Starbucks.

Lighter-roasted coffee emphasizes origin flavors and i agree with you --generally tastes better and is more interesting.

But you can’t sell coffee like that in tens of thousands of coffee shops and have it remotely consistent.

Coffee growing from the same plot but on one side of a hill will taste different from the other side due to getting different quantities of sunlight. Complex origin flavors will always be the domain of small specialty coffee shops.

Starbucks has McDonalds-like consistency serving millions of customers a day and that’s only because they emphasize the flavors they can get consistently–roast flavors.

TL;DR The bigger the chain, the darker you have to roast. That’s just how coffee works.

A Donnie Darko deep cut

Some styrofoam, some blow-molded plastic trays.

And the juice absorbing liner is always plastic, too.

Remember when the pre-grated Parm cheese came in the paper cylinder with a paper top with a metal spout? Like salt still is sometimes?

Remember when coffee beans came in paper bags and things like Oreos or keebler cookies came in corrogated paper sleeves with printed paper overwraps? Remember bread in paper bags? Why does gum now come in blow-molded cups?

You can’t even find rolls of wax paper anymore! It’s not the .1 mil wrap on ground meat that’s the real problem.

Taxes and regulations on the petrochemical companies are at all time lows and that lets the rest of these grocery companies get greedy and penny pinch their way to stockholder satisfaction and quarterly bonuses.

You can complain about consumer-end plastic all you want but it won’t stop until you cut it off at the source. When you hear, “Drill baby drill!” they’re not doing it for just your car (which incedently is also a huge source of plastic waste.) Hydrocarbon conglomerates are the source of all this nonsense.

But what are you going to do? 1. Be nice to your neighbors and Walk or ride your bike or 2. persecute minorities and immigrants and buy huge new SUVs every other year like the Tv tells you to?