Ground to Ground

There is a saying – ‘You never know how good you got something till it’s gone’.

I got a taste for that myself a few weeks back; a full size Long Black, boiling hot in a thin single cup. So hot the plastic lid started to buckle. The pain in my hand was only matched by the taste, actually not sure which pain was worse. The burned palm healed, but the mental scars of drinking what tasted like cigarette ash in water haunts me still.

It’s not like I didn’t deserve it. Their coffee was so bad in 2011 that McDonald’s launched a nationwide ‘We’re Sorry‘ for making crap coffee advertising campaign, and they went on to train their ‘baristas’ how to froth milk like no one else could. Seeing how the machine does everything else the only manual task is to move the cup under the machine, heat up the milk and then combine. Sure sometimes they even squirt in some chocolate sauce, and dust the top with powder!

But the Long Black don’t have that heated milk prepared by the specially trained milk heater-uperer. It relies on the quality of the beans, their roasting, quality of the water, and the temperature of the final prepared brew. And on all those counts, it consistently fails to meet even the lowest expectations of something you need to pay 4 bucks for.

But who is responsible exactly – the consumer or the supplier? I went in there to get some cash out, and normally bought a soft serve icecream cone because its the cheapest thing on the menu, until reading about how unhealthy they actually are on perfectly good human organs. So next time, I’m going to a bloody ATM 😉