What is the best place to get a cup of tea? Most people would say a tea shop, and they are right. Tea shops have the most variety and, a good portion of the time, their employees are trained on the types of tea. But what if there are no tea places near you? In Boston it should be quite easy to find a place that at least has good tea because it’s a city. But, as soon as you enter the suburbs of Boston, you start to notice that places to buy tea become few and far between. This leaves you with one of three options, Dunkin’, Starbucks, or a local coffee shop. For this article we are not going to focus on the local coffee shop option just because I simply do not have the time to be running around my old town looking for places to get a cup of tea. Now, let us get to comparing Dunkin’ and Starbucks!
The reason I choose to compare these two chains is they are both very popular in Massachusetts. Each have a location on campus, which is nice and convenient (as long as you ignore the 20-minute line at Dunkin’). I am only going to be trying their black iced tea, because that is something they both have, and then comparing what they offer for the rest of their tea collection.
The first thing to note is that Dunkin’s tea is cheaper than Starbucks’ and also offer larger sizes. So, when you go to Dunkin’s you get more bang for your buck. On the other hand, Starbucks’ tea does taste better. Dunkin’s tea has a strange aftertaste that is not bad but not great either. I find it to be weird, personally. I also noticed this with Dunkin’s green tea the last time I got it and it was even more pronounced than the black tea.
Starbucks on the other hand tastes fresh and it does not have any weird aftertaste to it at all. Starbucks also offers way more when it comes to the tea department than Dunkin’—not only with their hot tea but with their iced tea as well. You can mix it with lemonade or fruit and almost anything you want can be iced. They also have really good chai and green tea lattes which are great if you want a kick but you are not in the mood for coffee. There is also a much larger market for tea with Starbucks because they bought Teavana not too long ago. Teavana was a lot like David’s Tea where you could buy loose leaf tea and other tea accessories. I did prefer David’s Tea over Teavana, but the latter’s tea was very good and their employees usually knew what they were talking about which was a plus. This allowed Starbucks to offer more kinds of tea and see a different side of the morning caffeine kick.
So, if you want a cup of tea you should go to Starbucks. This is not saying anything bad about Dunkin’ at all but they are much better at coffee than tea. Starbucks also has better resources when it comes to tea and they make a great green tea latte!