A barista gets $9.90 an hour? That's about £4.45 in UK money, where the legal minimum wage is currently £5.35 ($10.70) per hour but from April 2008 it will be £5.73 ($11.40). I might add that Starbucks coffee tastes rather like urine, only worse.
not knowing what urine tastes like, I compre Starbucks to badly burnt coffee. I believe that their model is to make coffee so strong and burnt that the only way its drinkable is to turn it into a mixture with an equal amt of cream and foam.