If you say "Starbucks coffee is better than any other coffee in town" then one thing is almost certain: You're in the United States of America.

There's nothing wrong with that of course, but the author of this article (named Anne, by the way, so I doubt called "he" very often ;) lives in Poland and was writing about Warsaw.

In most of Europe, in a big city, Starbucks is almost guaranteed to be the... well let's say weakest, coffee in town. That much is pretty safe to say.

If you're in most places in the US that's going to be the reverse, the Starbucks in a place with the only alternative being a donut shop has saved my life on occasion. The important exceptions are cities like San Francisco, New York, and so on, in the Italian sections, where you can find a really good Italian or French cafe, in which I bypass Starbucks every time and head straight to those.

On price: it's somewhat overpriced in Paris, say, but it's an import, a novelty, and so on, so that's sort of natural. The fact is however that you can get much better coffee next door and at about a thousand other places and the price will be less.