Costa del Coffee (Costa Coffee)

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	Costa Coffee
Date:	06/05/09 (219 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Standardised quality whichever branch you visit, Gorgeous mince pies at Christmas

Disadvantages: Quite expensive, bland offerings, too standardised, can get very busy

Walk down pretty much any high street and the chances are you will walk past a Costa Coffee. The chances are also high that it will be busy.

The reason for this is not because Costa serves the best coffee, but because you can go there confident that you can go in and receive roughly the same level of quality whether you are in Aberdeen in Aberdare. Those standards may not be the highest, but at least you know what to expect.

I'm just as guilty of this as anyone. When I go to a new town, unless somewhere is recommended to me, I tend to head for Costa or Nero rather than an independent coffee house. Find the right independent coffee shop and it's a dream; find the wrong one and you could be faced with stale cake and dishwater drinks. That's the secret behind Costa's success. It's tapped into the nation's need to caffeine and consistency. Yet, this standardisation is also Costa's blessing and curse. You might know exactly what you will get, but sometimes that becomes boring.

Like all good coffee shops, Costa serves a range of different styles of coffee - Americano, espresso, cappuccino and so on. Obviously, prices depend on what you have, but a medium Americano costs just over £2. This is fairly standard, and doesn't compare too badly, although if you have a coffee habit like me, it works out pretty expensive! The drink is reasonable enough, although you can tell it has been mass-produced for the general palette and is neither too bland, nor too bitter. Real coffee aficionados will find it very disappointing and bland but it still beats a cup of warm dishwater you can sometimes be served! Costa coffee does, however, always make me very thirsty and leave me yearning for pints of water when I've drunk it.

Where Costa scores more highly over its high street rival, Café Nero, is in terms of the food it offers. Nero has a more limited choice of food from my perspective and I often find myself reduced to having the same thing if I go, not because I'm boring, but because there is nothing else for me to have. This is particularly true with regard to cakes. Costa on the other hand offers a slightly larger range. Of course, their range is still pretty limited and doesn't tend to change a great deal, so if you eat there regularly, boredom will soon set in. Essentially, they sell tried and tested stuff that sells well and again cater for standard tastes. If, like me, you quite like to try new things, Costa can be quite limiting.

The food is rather like their coffee - solid, if unspectacular. Their range of savoury items plays it safe, with standard fillings like chicken or cheese. They do produce a couple of slightly more adventurous items, such as Mozzarella and Basil Panini or cheese and chutney, but there are so many times you can have these. Their food is OK, although everything is clearly mass-produced and tastes like it. They are also quite expensive - particularly since they have recently increased the cost of many of their savoury items, whilst reducing the size. Certainly, if you are lucky enough to find a local independent coffee shop that does good sandwiches and snacks, their food will be far tastier and fresher than Costa's pre-packed efforts. Costa plays for the mass market, confident in the knowledge that mediocrity is acceptable to most people, providing it's standardised mediocrity.

Costa also offer a range of sweet snacks, which tend to change on a little bit of a more frequent basis (often seasonal). Cakes range from fairly basic things, such as carrot cake and shortbread biscuits, through to things like muffins and caramel shortbreads. I have to confess, I'm a sucker for their mince pies, although sadly these only appear at Christmas.

Cakes at Costa have two things in common: they are quite expensive and they are rather sweet (that's in a sugary, not a cutesy context!) Again, this shows very clearly that they are aiming for the mass market, as many people have a sweet tooth. Personally, I find them a little too sweet and often prefer to share a cake with Mrs SWSt or to have something savoury. Prices vary depending on what you have, but a piece of carrot cake, for example, costs around £2.25. You do get a reasonable sized slice for that, it still doesn't represent tremendous value for money. You could probably make a whole carrot cake at home for less than what two slices at Costa will cost you. Again, if you can find somewhere that sells home made cakes, they will be far nicer than Costa's over-priced, over-sweet efforts.

So identikit is virtually every branch of Costa that pretty much the only thing that varies is the level of service and the size of the branch. Service can either be fast and efficient or slow and unresponsive. In the best-staffed Costas, you rarely have to wait more than a few minutes, even at busy times. In the worst, you can queue for ages whilst staff deal with orders so slowly that a massive queue builds up.

Clearly Costa is doing things right, though, because it's always very busy and this can cause problems at certain times. Hit it at just the wrong moment and you may have to find yourself waiting around for ages for a table and then queuing to get served. If all you want is a nice sit down and drink after a hard day's shopping, this can be really frustrating.

At the end of the day, it's about choices. Costa is not particularly cheap, nor is it anything special. The trade-off is you know what exactly what you get, whichever branch you are in. It is, in effect, the MacDonald's of coffee houses and we all know how successful that has been. Costa has effectively insinuated itself into the public consciousness by playing on people's fear of the unknown. The fear of getting soggy cake and dishwater coffee means that the evil corporate empires of Costa and Nero will too often suck you in through their doors. And sadly, I'm just as guilty as anyone else.

© Copyright SWSt 2009

Summary: Standard, but unspectacular