not a stereotype. It's a truth most people don't know about: French people complain about anything and everything. Constantly. I should know, I'm one. And I'm from Paris on top of it, so I'm even worse than the average French guy when it comes to complaining. We particularly love to complain about bad food and drinks. I'll be honest here, the average coffee made in the US is particularly terrible (not talking about beans but about the final produt, if I mean beans I'll say beans). And so is the average coffee we get in France. Everyone I know who lives or has been to the US told me coffee there is watered down to hell or plain badly prepared. I haven't been to the US so I can't voice my own opinion about it but I highly trust the judgment of a couple of these people and will therefore go with it. In France, the main problem is that the coffee is waaaaay over heated (you could even say burnt), which makes it terribly, terribly bitter. So it is badly prepared here too. My fellow countrymen may not like to admit it but the coffee we prepare in France is pretty darn bad compared to Italian coffee for example (I did not admit it myself until I actually went to Italy and tried tons of their coffees). Even Starbucks, which a lot of people love in Europe (in France as much as in the UK), prepare disgusting coffee. To realise that, you need to drink good coffee in the first place and then you can never go back.
There are many different ways to prepare excellent coffee. The best coffees I've personally had were in Vienna (Austria), Italy, and Vietnam (surprising I know, but the coffee grown there is of an incredible quality!). The most important things when making a good coffee are: The preparation method, the beans, and the water. If you buy ground coffee, use a mainstream coffee maker, and fill your machine with tap water you cannot expect your coffee to be good. Even just changing one of those 3 things can make a huge difference.
A few years ago I bought an Italian espresso maker. It only cost me 20 euros and I've never made any coffee as good as with this thing in my life. Even when using tap water and supermarket ground coffee the results are mind blowingly different from using a normal coffee maker. And when I am motivated enough to grind coffee beans and use mineral water, it tastes divine.
It's basically a 3 compartments machine that works with the water boiling at the bottom, steaming up through the coffee in the middle and condensing in the top compartment. Simple, and yet it makes a huge difference. The downsides are it is slow, only makes one espresso at a time , and you cannot increase the output. So it is only for people who feel quality is worth the wait. If you want to surprise yourself, give it a try.
It looks a bit like this (the machine I use has its own heating support so its simpler for me): http://www.wikihow.com/Brew-Authentic-Italian-Caffe
This process is all about quality over quantity. If you want to spend 20 seconds on making enough coffee for a day then this is not it. And that is why most coffees you'll have in bars, restaurants, coffee places and so on will be bad. They need to be efficient, produce large amounts fast, and that doesn't rhyme with good coffee. I worked in a restaurant for 6 months, and we used to make batches of 10 liters of coffee. I had one cup of that coffee, and never another.
For another example: In Vietnam, the coffee beans are fresh (no need for imports) and grounded on site right before being used. They also use bottled water instead of tap water since tap water is often not safe for drinking. Knowing this would be enough to assume the coffee they make is great but they don't even stop there. On top of it they use an extremelly slow and very precise dripping process that I have never seen anywhere else. I slap myself daily about not bringing a few sets of this method home.
The dripping is done one cup of coffee at a time. They give you an empty cup, put a small metal filter on top of it, and then add a metallic compartment on top of that. They fill the top compartment with ground coffee and boiled water, it is designed so they can never go wrong on the dosage. They serve it as the dripping is just starting and with water on the side so you can water it down to your taste. The dripping is happening in front of you, you have to be patient enough for it to finish but god it's worth it. You should have seen my face when I realised that this Vietnamese coffee I was having would always be 100 times better than any coffee I'd ever get in France, where we are so proud of it.