I visited the coffee chain that Coca-Cola just bought for $5.1 billion - and I have no idea why anyone goes there
I went to the Costa Coffee on Whitechapel High Street in East London, near Business Insider's UK headquarters. The area boasts a plethora of chain coffee shops such as Pret a Manger, Caffè Nero and Starbucks as well as a smattering of independent stores.
Inside, Costa Coffee is a very bog-standard coffee shop. The decor is bland and inoffensive without being particularly nice, much like the food. The store itself has no particular theme or style, it's just... coffee shop.
Costa offers a range of food along with its coffees, including paninis, wraps and salads. Customers can also buy snacks like crisps and nuts as well as cold drinks like orange juice and, ironically, Pepsi.
Costa also sells a range of baked goods, from pain au raisin to millionaire's shortbread. At this point, staff told me to stop taking photos — so I did.
I ordered a flat white and a croissant, which came to £3.70 ($4.80).
The croissant looked and tasted like papier-mâché, and was inferior to most croissants you can buy for half the price in Britain's supermarkets. The coffee wasn't half bad, though, despite the cringe-worthy pun on the serviette.
One might think that Costa's ubiquity would drive the price down, but that's not the case.
While a cappuccino costs around 30p less in Costa than its UK competitors, those prices level out when you get into difference sizes and flavours, The Guardian says.
So why would anyone go there?The simple answer is that often it's the only place you can go.
Costas are ubiquitous in motorway services, train stations and airports.
In one motorway service station between York and Leeds in the north of England, there are no less than seven different outlets where one can buy Costa Coffee.
It makes sense, too.
"The footfall means that the difference between the volume of coffee we would usually serve in our existing locations and what we would serve in a train station or airport is phenomenal," Costa's creative director, Teddy Robinson, told The Guardian earlier this year.
Moreover, Costa Express vending machines can be found in more than 8,000 locations worldwide, often in supermarkets. This means that even if you're somehow not near a Costa coffee — you can still buy Costa coffee.
The reason that people go to Costa is not that it's their favourite coffee chain — it's because there's simply no escaping them.
Coca Cola presumably acquiring Costa because they were at a quiet regional train station and nothing else was available
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 31, 2018
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