Have you heard the ‘good’ news? Starbucks is coming to Malaga. Or at least to Malaga airport- when the new terminal opens this Easter.  It’s eight years now since the first two Starbucks opened in Madrid. Today there are 71 of them cluttering up the centres of Madrid, Barcelona and Sevilla. There are also two in Valencia. The next time I fly I shall not be joining the queue.

Why should I? Why, oh why, would I want to drink bland overpriced coffee (possibly faffed around with highly calorific syrups and toppings) out of an environmentally-unfriendly paper cup the size of a small dustbin? Especially and particularly when I can get a proper cup or glass of the stuff in any old spit-and-sawdust bar for a third of the price?

True, in Starbucks there’s no smoking, and there are comfy sofas and chairs, there’s wifi and there are newspapers – though the latter is nothing new in Spanish bars. But do you really need a bucket of coffee? A bucket of milk? Does it make sense that the smallest size coffee you can buy (called ‘tall’) holds 12oz, or nearly two thirds of a pint? Do you want everywhere in the world to offer exactly the same food and drink and lifestyle products – well, more than it already does? Is the quality of your life improved by being able to choose from 960 different kinds of coffee, milk and toppings? Or would you be happy, you know, with just an ‘old-fashioned’ café con leche?

There are times, of course, when you want to savour your coffee in a place with slightly more charm and sophistication than your basic no frills bar with its blaring TV, noisy slot machines, cigarette butt-strewn floor and one well-thumbed copy of Marca. But I’m sure that wherever you live in Spain, you will know a handful of independent coffee shops and teterías, each with its own special atmosphere, décor and menu. How many of these will last a Starbucks invasion?

Yes, yes, I know I sound like parochial and, I’ll be honest, I would love it if Spanish cafés offered skimmed milk and soy milk. And it is also true that when I first set foot in a Starbucks in the UK eight or nine years ago, I loved the sofas and newspapers. And the coffee, well, it wasn’t bad compared to what else was around.

The point is, though, I am not in the UK. I am in Spain -  a great coffee-making, coffee-drinking nation that needs Starbucks like it needs an EU directive banning siestas, puentes (Thursday’s a holiday so we may as well have Friday off, too), or ferias that go on till dawn.

Whether you think Starbucks is simply offering the customer more choice or whether you believe it is a part of US cultural and economic imperialism (16,000 branches, 43 countries), this is what one protester had to say in a message scrawled outside one of its cafés in Sevilla:

“No seas hortera. Tómatelo cortadito y en vaso. Starbucks go home.” Don’t be vulgar. Drink it with a splash of milk in a glass. Starbucks go home.”

Tags: life in Spain, Malaga, shops, Spanish life

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Food, Miscellaneous, Spanish life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.