To the contrary, you'd think chain food places would get it wrong, since they are the ones with the most incentive to serve you blackened Emu vomit. Skilled coffee brewing is a fairly delicate process, and really good coffee is going to be freshly brewed. Chain places make money through high volume and low labor costs, which means its better for their bottom line to mass brew the coffee and let it sit in a 20 gallon carafe until it runs out. This goes doubly on Monday morning, where all the coffee that they didn't sell because less people work early Sunday morning sits in the carafe in the cooler overnight.
You may be right in some sense, but you're mostly wrong. If their coffee isn't at least drinkable, people won't come back and buy it. It has to be drinkable for them to continue to sell volume. And it's normally not bad there, as anecdotal evidence.