St Mark's Coffee House

I was really excited about this place for a while. Cool funky surroundings, always filled with people talking, chillin, reading, working on their laptops. Seems like a great place to hang , read, study... except for one thing, which is that the staff seems determined to communicate, in every way humanly possible, that they could give a crap about their customers. What do they care, when the customers seem to keep coming no matter rude or indifferent they are. The quality of espresso drinks is horribly uneven and often just horrible (they could care less what they serve you), and if it gets a little busy, the baristas will treat you like cattle. The snarky attitude seems to come from the top-- the owner put up what I first thought was a suggestion box (nice caring touch, community, etc) but then I realized it was positioned over the garbage pail and had an open bottom so that when someone put something in the slot, it would drop into the trash. It might have been an amusing joke somewhere else, but there's no joke when everything else here reeks of "f--k you." The last straw, I went in one evening with an older friend, mid 50s, very polite, mild mannered gentlemanly type. While we sitting and talking (and others were reading or studying) , the barista cranked the music.so loud that no one could hear themselves think let alone hold a conversation. All the customers started looking at each other, cringing, rolling their eyes at one another. Some people actually got up and left. My friend asked the barista, very respectfully and politely, if he could possibly turn down the volume just a bit. It's not a library" was the reply, with barely a glance at my friend. I'm done. I can get a better latte at just about any coffee shop (and a truly awesome one at Hooked on Colfax, which is not too far away), without getting treated like a piece of you know what.