This Costa location has improved since my last visit, warranting an improved rating.
It seems to be one of the few Costa branches in town that actually has a working ice machine, I've regularly been turned away from the branch inside Next, and the other branch on Market Street, in Piccadilly Gardens due to them suffering from a fault.
The iced teas have improved significantly since Coca-Cola bought out Costa and replaced them with Fuze Tea, my go-to order here has become the Strawberry Mint Iced Tea, which is pretty good.
The staff are friendly, there is a security guard who works here who is especially friendly/helpful, I do feel a little uncomfortable that a coffee shop has to have security in the first place, but he lifts that ease and is a good employee.
PRO TIP: Bring a reusable cup and you'll get an extra bean on your loyalty card, meaning you'll get a free drink after buying four, rather than eight, do make sure your drink is the same size as the cup though, in my instance I used a much larger cup, and they watered it down to fill the cup, and it wasn't very pleasant.
There are still a couple of issues, for example, I do find the coffee quality here to be poor, but I find this to be common at all Costa locations, other store specific issues include the awful WiFi and mobile data signal in the cafe, making it very difficult to get work done as it seems there's something scrambling the signal to make it non-existent, other issues include the opening hours being listed as closing at 9 pm online when they instead close at 7 pm, again not the store's fault but after informing head office they refused to acknowledge they had their opening hours listed wrong!
3* - An improved Costa branch, but not perfect. read more