By Parents’ Weekend of freshman year, I had already spent 66 of my 75 Flex Dollars, $2 at a time, on 33 small black coffees at Uncommon Grounds. That amounts to nearly one every morning before my 10 a.m. Italian class.
I justified it to myself by saying “I’m not drinking it for the taste, I’m drinking it to keep myself up.” That Parents’ Weekend, upon learning of my impending Flex Dollar shortage, my dad bought me a small Keurig purely for the sake of cost-effectiveness: 40-cent K-cups were cheaper than $2 coffees.
It also had a different, wonderful side effect: I started liking coffee again.
I’ve been raised on coffee—there are home videos of a one-year old me toddling around the kitchen with a sippy cup full of decaf. As I write, there are five tins of espresso in my cupboards. Today, I framed and hung a coffee menu for guests to my room. I love coffee more than most of my immediate family. And as a proud Hoya, I’m ashamed to say that the coffee situation on campus is beyond abysmal.
Of the multiple providers of coffee on campus, the Corp is obviously the most notorious, running Uncommon Grounds, More Uncommon Grounds, and Midnight Mug. And, as all Georgetown students know, Corp coffee is horrific. Mind you, they make up for it by making creative drinks with fun names that cost $4 a pop. But in regards to their plain black coffee, it’s a half-step above Leo’s coffee in quality. The only thing darker and muddier than a black coffee from the Corp is your soul after one serving.
This raises the obvious question: why does their coffee taste so bad? First, their beans: considering that Students of Georgetown, Inc. had a profit margin of just under $310,000 for the last fiscal year, you’d figure they could buy better beans. That’s what they did with their food: the baked goods from the Corp are bought from Bread and Co., a solid catering service. Apparently, the idea that a coffee shop might pay as much attention to its coffee as its food is just too ludicrous.
I have friends who worked at Starbucks in high school and did not get hired by the Corp. Fun fact: knowing how to make a good coffee is not one of the necessary qualities of a Corp barista; what matters more are your tastes in music and willingness to work 8 a.m. shifts. Considering that the Corp’s acceptance rate is lower than Georgetown’s, they definitely have the requisite applicant pool for better baristas. That they do not have more qualified staff is their own choice.
All of this would be okay if there were other good options on campus. Unfortunately, these are few and far between. Your best choices are Saxbys, which is just off campus but does not accept flex dollars and, therefore, doesn’t really fit on this list, and Einstein Bros. Einstein Bros has quality coffee that you can flex or include in their Grab n’ Go meal swipe options. The existence of Einstein’s in Regents should preclude any possibility of anybody ever buying a regular coffee from the nearby UG.
When people think of alternatives to the Corp, however, they do not think of Einstein’s. Instead, they think of Starbucks, despite the fact that the Einstein’s in Regents is actually closer to Sellinger than Starbucks. Mind you, Starbucks has good quality coffee—I’ve been a proud gold member of Starbucks since February 2012—it just so happens that ours is the worst run Starbucks on the face of the planet. I have had orders forgotten, ingredients left out, and perhaps worst of all, orders switched with other patrons. The line is so inefficiently run that on most afternoons, it will be out the door and just barely moving. This would be inexcusable for any Starbucks not on a college campus.
Coffee is a necessity for most college students. We are a perpetually overworked and underslept people in need of the bitter darkness of coffee. The subpar quality of the vast majority of coffee sold on this campus is a disservice to the hardworking men and women who make up the Georgetown community. What Hoyas need is a better cup of Joe.
The Corp actually buys their coffee from a decent supplier, people just seem inclined to think that the coffee is bad instinctively. I doubt many people would be able to differentiate between Corp Coffee and Einsteins or Starbucks in a blind taste test. Regardless, anyone who finds K cups sufficient to make them ‘start liking coffee again’ is clearly more interested in branding than the quality of the beans anyways. In that respect the Corp likely falls short of Keurig, but if you think that buying beans that were ground up several months ago and left in a little plastic cup in some warehouse before being trucked across the country to your safeway of choice is going to be high quality you probably have tastes in coffee that would align poorly with those of most people.
Kcups are absolutely terrible for the environment
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/business/energy-environment/04coffee.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Hey Joe,
A few comments:
1) Have you ever applied to The Corp? If not, you should make that clear, so you don’t sound like you’re bitter because you were rejected. But if so, that seems like a major editorial oversight.
2) Why does this op-ed spend 90% of its time complaining about The Corp when clearly you should have just as large a bone to pick with Startbucks? While I’m in agreement that The Corp’s coffee is subpar, I think the larger outrage should be that a professional coffee shop is so poorly run. The Corp is “student-run” and not-for-profit — it doesn’t claim to be upscale and professional the way Starbucks does.
3) Generally, when consumers dislike the quality of a product, they respond by not purchasing it, rather than ranting in an opinion piece. If you really want to get The Corp to listen, convince other people not to shop there.
Hey blablah112233445,
A few comments,
1) Have you ever submitted a piece to the Voice? If not, you should make that clear, so you don’t sound like you’re bitter because you’re rejected. But if so, that seems like a major oversight of personal integrity.
2) That’s a good point: why would Joe choose to focus most of his writing on the Corp? Why does he complain soooo muuuch about the Corp’s 3 centrally located coffee locations that the majority of the undergraduate population goes to when he could be devoting equal time to a Starbucks’ singular vendor located at the ass-crack of Leavey? Might he be presuming that since the Corp is a “student-run organization” (as you so dutifully pointed out), it would be a bit more open to consumer suggestion than a $14-billion coffeehouse behemoth in charge over 23,000 stores in 65 countries? Might he be suggesting that the Corp, a “student-run organization” and also ‘the largest entirely student-run 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation in the world’ (to quote their website), be held to the same marginal standards of quality product and customer service as other businesses? Goodness, who knows.
3) Generally, when consumers disagree with a opinion piece, they respond by clicking to another article, rather than taking time out of their day to leave a critical comment that creates the illusion of cohesion and therefore quality (much like a certain “student-run” organization) via numbering. Perhaps Joe’s point is that there is no decent place to go to on campus; that in fact he cannot make an argument to go somewhere else (despite Einstein’s) because there is nowhere else to go.
If you really want to make a decently insightful comment, read more carefully next time.