If you're not plugged into the specialty coffee world, you'll think places like Peets are "excellent". Next time you go to SF, try Ritual and Blue Bottle and Sightglass (and my last visit there was 5-ish years back, so I'm certainly out of date with newer recommendations, and I seem to recall Blue Bottle "sold out" and may not be genuinely specialty grade coffee any more...)
25-30% of my rss feed is coffee-related, probably 20% of my Youtube subscriptions are coffee-related. The far end of the excellent coffee bell curve isn't _that_ hard to find, but here in Sydney, for example, many of the top 10-20 places are good enough that they're coffee destinations in their own right, and are not paying for high foot traffic locations in city centers. I've got four great roasters fairly nearby, all pretty much in the middle of light industrial hell. They're in between nondescript warehouses and bearing shops and panel beaters and down the street from new loft conversions selling the "hipster scene" they've partly created (along with the breweries and live music venue and motorcycle workshops nearby). People get in their cars or get a cab/Uber to go there because Hazel and Claire roast there, or because Dan is the head barista, or because Sasa trains everyone personally, or because Reuben sources all the green beans himself.
Go find _those_ places in your city, then tell us what you think of Peets and Starbucks... And maybe you won't care. Not eveybody does, and that's fine. Maybe it'll ruin you for life, and you'll never be able to drink mediocre coffee again - and you might think that's wonderful of you might hate me for it... But go find out...
