I know it was probably startling to find the swastika at the bottom of your glass, but you cannot assume it was meant to be a bad thing since you are in Asia. The symbol is quite prevalent here and has a completely different connotation.
Starbucks pastries are bad in the West, we shouldn't expect anything different here. SB's Mocha are still the best - for now.
The service at the KaiFaQu Starbucks is quite nice, but the Parkland SB seemed a little less welcoming to me as well.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
bad experience at Starbucks in Parkland, Thursday, 04 October 2007
For my birthday my girlfriend invited me to Starbucks because we thought they might have good coffee and good cake there... So we went to the Starbucks in the Parkland Shopping Mall.
We ordered two coffees and two strange looking cakes. The coffee was okay I think. The cake was maybe chinese style. So we decided to get a standard chocolate muffin and another cake that looked familiar to us. My girlfriend bought them and they gave her really the oldest pieces of cake I ever had in a coffe or restaurant. They were really dry and hard and smelled like onion. And the staff was not really treating her nice, maybe because she is half chinese... I dont know. So I took the muffin and the cake and talked to one employer to get the money back. He tried to tell me that it's fresh and that it's american style... I insited of getting the money back even after he offered to microwave it for a better taste... eh yeah...
I got back to the table to finish my coffe which actually was a frappucion... so this icecoffe kind of thing in a plastic cup...
When I finished it I could see some strange drawing on the bottom of the plastic cup (it's seethrough....) and I turned it around. It was a "swastika" symbol - the symbol the nazis used. If you know something about german history you will know that this is maybe not the best birthday-present you can get if you are a german...
My girlfriend and I were really angry about that and shocked... this was the first time that I made an experience like this in China... I think the person who did that didn't know too much about european history... and I think he or she did not know that I am a german... so well... but still it really sucked. And the way they treated my girlfriend was also not too nice... I don't understand that. Starbucks should be a place for everbody. I don't get why the staff - or maybe it was only one guy - is racist...
Finally I want to say that the coffee tasted okay. The atmosphere and the cakes are crap and everything is too expensive!(at least for chinese conditions) My suggestion: Don't go there!
anneli
Coltsfan
