Results of Starbucks interview

The staff of Starbucks told us some very important information about their café, this is not the first coffee shop opened in a bookshop in fact this is the second one because the first one is Costa café. Besides, they told us it’s better have a café in a bookshop because people can sit down and relax reading a book. They have been in Oxford for 5 years.Starbucks sells espresso whole bean coffee which people can buy, take home and grind to make coffee at home as well as a large range of coffees from all over the world. They told us their company doesn’t need a lot of advertising because they are a very well-known, global brand; new products are advertised “in-store” using visuals like posters or fliers. But their best advertising is ‘word-of-mouth’. It’s not a licensed café, they are a company owned store. They like interacting with their customers, in fact this is the biggest part of what they do. Starbucks think they can make customers happy with eye contact, a smile, and saying thank you ……

THE EXAM DAY

Last Friday we had the trinity exam; before this day we prepared ourselves helped by our English teachers of Eckersley Oxford and our Italian teachers.
The trinity exam (9th grade) is carried out through a personal topic that we prepared before, an interactive task where we have to ask some questions on a situation to the examiner and also a conversation about a specific topic area for example: crime and punishment, global environment, dreams and nightmares, habits and obsessions, technology and design.
The night before the exam we were very nervous and exited at the same time and for this reason unfortunately some of us did not have a good sleep.
The exam day we went to school early in the morning even though some of us had the exam in the afternoon. The hours went on and everyone finished the exam.
We were very happy when an hour later the end of the exam the teachers told us that we had passed the exam but unfortunately two of our mates failed the exam.At the end we were ready to leave from Oxford to spend a fantastic weekend in London!!

Interview at Costa Cafe

During this week our task was to interview the manager of Costa Café. We left school at 10:00 a.m. and with Rodney and Julia` s help we interviewed Rob the manager.
We prepared an introduction to explain our project and our work before coming to England and also the reason of our choice.


INTRODUCTION: Good afternoon, we are Italian students from Eckersley Oxford School. We are doing a project about coffee, which we started, in Italy by visiting a coffee factory called Trucillo and researching information about coffee. We are here in Oxford to carry out this project and to improve our English. We would like to ask you some questions.
We chose to come here because it is an Italian café in Oxford.
Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by us, it will help us a lot with our research.


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QUESTIONS:

1) How long has this café been here?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2) How many hours do you work every day? Are you tired at the end of the day?
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3) When does Costa café open and close? What are your busiest times of day?
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4) What` s the most popular coffee in this café? Why?
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5) Do people prefer to take their coffee away or drink in?
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6) What type of customer drinks coffee here? Students? Mothers? Office workers?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

7) Do you sell Italian coffee in this café? If yes, is it popular? If not, why not?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

8) What is the most expensive coffee? How much does it cost? And the cheapest?
…………………………………………………….………………………………..………….…………………………………………………………………………..


ANSWERS

1) October 2006

2) 8 from 10 hours. Yes, I’m tired

3) The opened is at 8 in the morning and the closed is at 6 in the afternoon.
The busiest time is between 11 to 2 pm.

4) The most popular coffee is Coffee Latte.

5) People prefer drink coffee in because they need to relax, sit and watch other go pass

6) All type of people drinks coffee, especially families on Saturday and Sunday

7) Yes, we sells it, it is very popular.

8) Moka flooke is the most expensive 2.45 pounds and English coffee is the chipper with 1.70 pounds

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Conclusion Costa Café Groups
After finishing the interview we were so tired but happy. We interviewed the manager of Costa Café called Rob. Costa Café has been open since October 2006 every day from 8 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon. The busiest time is between 11 to 2 pm and he said this is the most popular café of Oxford. People prefer drinking coffee in because they need to relax, sit and watch others go past. All types of people drink coffee, especially families on Saturday and Sunday. The most popular coffee is `Coffee Latte` , `Moka Flooke` is the most expensive at 2.45 pounds and English coffee is the cheapest at 1.70 pounds.

RESULTS OF INTERVIEW

On 20th of March 2007 we interviewed people in Oxford about our project using the questionnaire we made in Italy( which we translated into English ).
We stopped many people on the main street but we could interview only ten people because the others said to us that they don’t drink coffee and they weren’t interested in answering our questions.
The majority of people said they always drink a lot of coffee, but they don’t like decaffeinated coffee because they think decaffeinated coffee tastes bad, so they don’t drink it.
In their opinion drinking coffee is a time to relax, to meet new people and energize themselves and they drink coffee regularly.
Only two people knew that caffeine is used for medical purposes although the others told us drinking coffee is not advisable if they have heart disease.
These are the results:

We can conclude that the majority of English people. We interviewed, said they drink normal coffee regularly. They think coffee is very nice drink and it represents a new tradition for English people.

Questionnaire For “Saveur De France”

Questionnaire For “Saveur De France”

1) In your opinion, is it important to advertise a café in order to generate good business?
Yes I think that whoever has a business needs to advertise. It is really important because people have to know who are you and what you do.

2) How do you advertise? Do you think this method of advertising is effective?
Generally I advertise in the newspaper and word of mouth. I’m sure that these methods are really effective!

3) Does it help you having your shop near Eckersley Oxford?
Yes, I think it is a well run school with brilliant students, and people who work in this school often have a coffee at ”Saveur De France”.

4) In your opinion, is the service of coffee in café as important as the quality of the coffee itself?
Yes, it is really a priority for me and for my staff.

5) Have you got a particular way of serving coffee in this café? What is it? How is it special/unique?
I chose Italian methods because my family is half Italian and half Brazilian and I think it is really special.

6) Have you ever heard of specific courses to improve coffee preparation and service?
Yes, I have done a specific course for few days in London by an Italian company called “Costa” and I’m teaching my staff what I learn.

7) Do you think that with coffee preparation courses, skills could be improved?
Yes, because people who have done a preparation course make better coffee.

8)How important are professionalism and manners for you in this café?
Having a good service is really important not only for cafés but for every person who has a business.

Coffee habits

There are some differences between coffee drunk in Italy and coffee drunk in the U.K.
One of these differences is the time we usually have a black coffee during the day. For example, in Italy, we usually have a coffee in the morning at the bar, after lunch at home, or before we come back home from the disco.
On the other hand English people like drinking white coffee and at different times.
Another difference is about the coffee as a drink: in Italy we have a small and strong coffee, while in UK as in the rest of the world, people usually have a long coffee without milk called “black coffee”, or “white coffee” long coffee but with milk.
When we tried to ask some English people why they usually drink a long coffee instead of an Italian espresso coffee, they always answered that is because they don’t like our strong coffee taste.
Then to have a comparative test we interviewed some English people and students who came from all over the world.
We asked them some questions about their knowledge of coffee.
All students told us drinking coffee helps them to concentrate. These students are from Yemen, Korea and Saudi Arabia. The results showed 35% of students often drink coffee and they usually drink it at breakfast in bars like Starbucks; these students like drinking normal coffee because it’s not so strong as Italian espresso coffee. All the students said there are some differences between normal and decaffeinated coffee in particular in taste. In their opinion drinking coffee is a way to energize themselves. Besides, the students said drinking is advisable for people who have heart problems and they think caffeine is used for medical purposes. Through these interviews we realized they know more about coffee than we expected.
To conclude we think there are different types of habits of drinking coffee in the world, remember; coffee is like life it maybe bitter or sweet.

Sainsbury’s supermarket & Whittard Interviews

We went to two different coffee shops and we interviewed the two managers of these.
Now we can say that in Sainsbury’s supermarket there are all kind of coffee like: instant coffee, decaffeinated coffee, freshly ground coffee, fair-trade coffee and coffee bags.
The manager told us that the majority of young English people drink cappuccino and other similar beverages while the others drink instant coffee, especially Nescafe’.
Whittard is a little shop of tea, coffee and chocolate. In this shop you can smell the coffee beans so you can choose your favourite kind of coffee to buy. Also you can buy different coffee machines, we saw Italian coffee machines, French coffee machines and American coffee machines.
Both these coffee shops sell the fair-trade coffee that have a specific logo so you can recognize it, the Whittard manager told us that fair-trade coffee is very popular in England although it is very expensive.
Also we have learnt that Blue Mountain coffee is lighter and more expensive than other coffee but the Queen of England prefers it.
Coffee prices are more expensive in Whittard than in Sainsbury’s supermarket but the quality is better, and we think that Sainsbury’s supermarket has more different blends like Turkish blend, Brazilian blend, Costa Rica blend and Blue Mountain blend.
At the end, both managers think that coffee has become a new tradition in the each English people’s lives!

Is Starbucks a world chain?

We interviewed some staff of Starbucks, which is situated in a bookshop called Borders. We asked them some questions about:
· Speciality coffee
· Social aspects of coffee

Starbucks looked like a very quiet café especially because it is in a bookshop and it’s a chain, it has been here for five years. Unfortunately it’s not the first coffee shop in a bookshop but we think it’s special one because while you are reading your book, you can also listen to soft music, to relax yourself.
We think that this experience can’t put it into words. In all of the world there are a lot of Starbucks, but not in Italy because in Italy they wouldn’t be so successful.
The advertising for Starbucks is not important because it’s so popular and word of mouth brings customers. In England the people haven’t got the same idea about speciality coffee as in Italy because in Italy there are many different types of coffee like “Kinderone coffee”, “Nocciotella coffee” etc.

Interview with manager

During this week our task was to interview the manager of Costa Café. We left school at 10:00 a.m. and with Rodney and Julia` s help we interviewed Rob the manager.
We prepared an introduction to explain our project and our work before coming to England and also the reason of our choice.


INTRODUCTION: Good afternoon, we are Italian students from Eckersley Oxford School. We are doing a project about coffee, which we started, in Italy by visiting a coffee factory called Trucillo and researching information about coffee. We are here in Oxford to carry out this project and to improve our English. We would like to ask you some questions.
We chose to come here because it is an Italian café in Oxford.
Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by us, it will help us a lot with our research.


QUESTIONS:

1) How long has this café been here?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2) How many hours do you work every day? Are you tired at the end of the day?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

3) When does Costa café open and close? What are your busiest times of day?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

4) What` s the most popular coffee in this café? Why?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

5) Do people prefer to take their coffee away or drink in?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

6) What type of customer drinks coffee here? Students? Mothers? Office workers?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

7) Do you sell Italian coffee in this café? If yes, is it popular? If not, why not?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

8) What is the most expensive coffee? How much does it cost? And the cheapest?
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INTERVIEWS

Interview
26 March 2007

We asked the questions you read in the blog and people answered as follows:

1) Age2) Job:

3) The word coffee means…

4) Do you prefer normal coffee or decaffeinated coffee?

5) What are the differences between normal coffee and decaffeinated coffee?

6) What do you think about coffee drinkers?

7)People drink coffee to…

8) Where and when do you usually have coffee?

Conclusion

So we can conclude that people think that the word “coffee” means expresso, Italy and relax. People interviewed by us prefer normal coffee because it is different from decaffeinated because of its taste and aroma. People usually have a coffee in the morning in a café and they are occasional drinkers. They think that people who have hypertension or disease like this should not drink coffee. And finally 40% of the interviewed think that caffeine is a pharmacologically active substance, 40% of the interviewed disagree and the 20% don’t know.It was really interesting for us to do these interviews because it helps us a lot to know more about English habits about coffee.

QUE PASA NIGHT

March, 22nd, 2007

Last night we went to a disco pub: Que pasa. At half past eight we met each other at the bus stop near the school and after that we waited for the teacher and then we went to the pub. At the beginning in the pub there were some tables with chairs in the centre of the room, but after an hour, the pub really became a disco! The tables were removed, and the room became a dance floor!
There were a lot of people and together we danced all night!!
Some of us had a cocktail or a beer, our teacher too. In the pub nobody had a coffee or a drink based on coffee although on the menu we saw coffee, everybody preferred to drink beer. At Que Pasa we met a lot of foreign people like other Italian like us, Japanese people (that danced with us), Russian people and so on.
The only bad thing was that we had to go out at eleven o’clock because that’s when the last bus left and the day after we had school.
This was a very enjoyable night, we hope to have another night like this!!!!!!!!!!

Our first impressions of Oxford

Our first impressions of Oxford

Our journey started in Naples when we took the aeroplane for Gatwick.
It was a great experience because for most of our friends it was the first time we had flown.
When we arrived in England it was very strange because cars drive on the left and the street was cleaner than in Italy. Unfortunately the weather was not so good…outside the airport there was a bus waiting for us. Later we took the bus for Oxford where we waited for our host families. At first we were frightened about this new experience especially about the family because we were unsure about our English.
But the families were friendly and we enjoyed ourselves. We understood there were big differences between England and Italy in general, especially between Italian and English food .
The day after that was our first day at Eckersley Oxford school: we were very happy and really exited about this new experience; we were divided in to two groups with two different teachers: “Luke and Julia”; their aim will be to prepare us to pass the trinity exam, help us in our project about coffee and so to improve our English.

VISIT TO OXFORD

Our first day at school in Oxford, it was divided in some parts: first of all our class made two tests and after that a tour around the school and we talked about our coffee project with our teacher.After this we spoke about what we will do to improve our English and complete our project. After a break for lunch, we went out of the school and we walked around Oxford with our teacher, Luke that took us to Corner market Street where there are many shops and a very interesting market where there are traditional shops of Oxford. In this town there is a wide variety of places like museum, churches and many colleges (about 33).

We saw the oldest library in the town where “Harry Potter” was set. Another very interesting place is the “Flower Garden of spring” that contains many painting from India. We think that Oxford is exciting, fascinating and fun and it has a beautiful historical centre and now we want to find out about entertainment for young people like us.

Visiting Oxford

Visiting Oxford
Report about the 19/03/2006 experience

In this report we’re going to talk about our visit to Oxford.
We visited lots of places including:
· “Bodliean Library”, which is the biggest library in Oxford, where all students can go in order to study and research;
· “Trinity College”;
· “Museum of the History of Science”;
· “Carfax Tower”, which is situated in the centre of the city.
Our teacher Julia showed us the statue of “Alice in Wonderland”, which is of very big importance, because the writer of the novel studied here in Oxford.
Our goal was to visit cafes, because our project is based on coffee. We also visited many coffee shops:
· “Coffee Bar Brother”;
· “Starbucks”, which is a chain of coffee shops;
· “Whittard”, which specialises in tea and coffee;
· “Living food Nutrition”, this shop gives opportunity to drink coffee without caffeine, it represents on alternative to people who don’t drink traditional coffee. There also was an Indian restaurant with a particular name: “Cafè Zouk”.
To continue we had a walk across the principal roads, having a look at the shop windows.
Also, we noticed that here in England the bookshops are called cafe too. The thing that struck our attention the most was the shape of buildings, that are really different from Italian ones. As a matter of fact, they gave us the sensation of walking around a medieval old city.

Introduction

Before we arrived in Oxford, my friends and I did a little project in Italy. It isn’t complete yet, but we are nearly at the end. The theme of our project is coffee, a typical drink which people all over the world drink everyday. We studied all about coffee: coffee grounds, coffee machines, coffee brewing, social aspects of coffee and the history of it. While I was studying “coffee” I realized that I didn’t know a lot of things about it. To know more about coffee we went to “Trucillo”: a factory, where a lot of people talked to us about their coffee. I was surprised when they told me that coffee is composed of a wide variety of coffee beans.
For the theme of our project we could choose between tomatoes, artichokes, coffee, and other kinds of food. We chose coffee because of all us drink a lot of it everyday. Some of us can’t live without coffee and we think it is more interesting than the other subjects.This is reason why we have chosen it!!!

Questionnaire

A week before we came in Oxford we have done a presentation in our school in Italy in front of a lot of people and some managers of the “trucillo” café where we showed all the things we have researched and learned during this project. Before the presentation we made a questionnaire to tested what the Italian people know about coffee, after that we gave the questionnaire to people who watched the presentation.


COFFEE

Age (a) from 15 to 35 years old (b) from 36 to 55 years old (c) over 55 years old

Sex (1) Male (2) Female

Profession: Qualification:

Director (a) primary school(a)
Professional (b) high school (b)
Teacher (c) university (c)
Employee (d)
Housewife (e)
Student (f)

What do you think if I say the world “COFFEE” to you?
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1) Do you drink coffee:
a) Often
b) Sometimes
c) Rarely
d) Never

2) Where and when do you drink coffee?
a) at breakfast
b) in family
c) in the middle of the morning
d) in the bar
e) with friends

3) You drink :
a) normal coffee
b) decaffeinated
c) black coffee

4) In your opinion, is there any difference between normal coffee and decaffeinated?
a) Yes
b) No

5) In your opinion, what are the differences between traditional and decaffeinated coffee?
a)taste
b) smell
c)colour

6) What is your opinion about regular coffee drinkers?
a) healthy
b) snob
c) it helps you to concentrate

7) Drinking coffee, for you is:
a) a time to relax
b) a time to meet
c) a way to energize yourself


8) Is drinking coffee advisable for people who have heart problems?
a) yes
b) no

9) In your opinion, is caffeine used for medical purposes?
a) yes
b) no
c) maybe

Our first days in Eckersley School of English

When we arrived in Oxford, at this school, we were surprised because the boss had divided our group in two. At first Rodney, a photographer, took a photo of us and he published it in the hall of school. Two groups have two different teachers, Luke and Julia. The first lesson each of us did a test to see our English level. After a break for lunch we visited the school and Oxford city centre. Before we went back home, our teachers asked us to prepare a little composition about our visit. The second day we gave our homework to teachers and we corrected our mistakes of our test, then we interviewed some people in Cornmarket St. to complete our Italian project about coffee. Today we have repeated grammar about how and when we can use Present Perfect and Past Simple tense: now we are writing up and setting up this blog like it is a diary.

INTERVIEW DAY 1: Answers

we found people to interview in the centre of OXford expecially in CornMarket ST , High St and in the shopping centre. We were divided in groups and we used a camera to record our interviews. First of all we prepared a questionaire about the topic that everyone prepared in italy about coffee. We down to the streets to ask questions to people about their impression about coffee. The average age was 25 and the majority were students.