Caribou Coffee — Restaurant in Minneapolis

I love going to Caribou Coffee and have never had a bad experience until now. It's 3/14/16 and 6:33 pm for the cameras sake. I'm the guy sitting by the entrance window in the Grey sweater and blue jeans.

Upon buying a coffee and taking a seat by the front entrance window, I noticed the area around me was a disgusting mess. To go cups laying on their side on the furniture around me and a plate full of crumbs on the window sill that had attracted a colony of ants that were now all over the place. Upon bringing it to the girls attention, ( The brunette working ) she quickly picked up the trash and quickly returned to the counter to talk to all her male friends who came in to visit her only to be a loud group of anxious people laughing and being disruptive while there are ants crawling around everywhere and still crumbs everywhere.

To see staff not caring about the cleanliness or insect problem of their store but more concerned with the men their to see them was a total disgust and my first bad experience with Caribou Coffee. If a person doesn't take their stores image seriously and doesn't mind ants everywhere, I won't be going there anymore. These employees should seriously be better trained and care more about the company's image and...

Will get you going. While I can appreciate a cup of quality coffee, I don't drink it primarily for the taste, and I'm loathe to spend more than a dollar on a cup, quite frankly. The markup on already-brewed coffee is just criminal. If it's gonna cost that much, the poor schlubs who serve it to us ought to be paid a lot better, and not be counting on good tips to make their labors worthwhile, not to mention we are already paying enough.

Aaannnyway... the cost of Caribou's coffee (and I mean just coffee... don't get me started about the markup on the hoity-toity drinks), is a fair bit lower than at a number of other establishments who shall remain nameless. Getting back to my aforementioned primary reason for drinking coffee, every time I've gotten some at Caribou it has been ROCKET FUEL. I've seriously been that impressed every time. I have to wonder if caffeine content is second only to flavor on their list of criteria when curating their beans.

It's also always...

The staff has been very friendly and kind in my experience and I've gotten my drinks pretty quickly but - I just the drinks themselves weren't very good. I know that's a risk with some fast coffee chains, but I felt both times I went for coffee it tasted burnt. I tried the energy drinks today - the blue raspberry was okay, maybe a little sweet/syrupy. I felt the pineapple strawberry lemonade energy just tasted a bit like sparkling water and not much else (a bit contradictory - I know- just in general I felt the ratios may have been off some.) Caribou does seem to have some good deals though in the app so that can be appreciated. Overall not the best, but not the worst. Kinda just mid. I would recommend some of the other drinks besides the coffee. While I only found the energy drinks okay it's leagues above burnt...