Well personally I think Bob’s a great name for a coffee
Tag: starbucks
okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and
i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.
so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.
it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved
the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.
it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.
This reminds me an awful lot about Starbucks.
No, seriously. Before Starbucks, America was a coffee wasteland. Coffee was a thing you got at diners and drivethroughs. It was a cheap hot thing you put made palatable with tons of cream and sugar, and most people (but waning!) had a coffee machine at home.
Starbucks told us that we could like coffee. That coffee could be an enjoyable thing, that it could be a status symbol and a ritual. That there could be a place where you go for coffee, and you enjoy it.
As a coffee snob, I think Starbucks’ coffee is awful. But Starbucks is why we have better coffee. Starbucks created the market space for third wave coffee shops and artisanal roasters. They reintroduced “espresso”, “latte” and “cappuccino” to the American lexicon.
We need stuff that’s heinously popular. That’s how culture works.
m4ge:
i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream
you say this jokingly but i had a customer actually order a pumpkin spice latte with 9 shots of espresso (also no whip) and when i asked her to verify that she did indeed want 9 shots of espresso she looked me dead in the eyes and said “i have 5 kids”
I once had a woman come in and ordered an Americano with 19 shots of espresso. The drink took ages. It held up the line. I asked her why, and she shrugged and said “I just don’t care”. We still talk about that woman. We never saw her again.
new cryptid: exhausted woman at starbucks
Actual conversation I had at register:
“Hi, welcome to [Starbucks]! What can I get you, today?”
“How much is it to fill a Venti with Espresso?”
“I- I’m sorry?”
“A venti cup. How much to fill it with Espresso?”
“Oh. uh. Well, it’d be I suppose… I only have a button for a Quad. I don’t have special pricing for twenty ounces of espresso in a single… drink.”
“Price is the furthest thing from my mind right now. How many ‘add shots’ is that?”
*deep breath of fear* “It’d be a quad with,” *clears throat* “uh, sixteen additional shots of espresso. But, ma’am, I should tell you that the shots will start to get really bitter if they have to sit and wait for us to pull twenty of them-”
“Taste means nothing to me.”
At this point I am truly fearing for my very existence in the presence of what must clearly be an eldritch being.
“Oh. Well, okay.” I put on my absolute best customer service smile to hide my terror and accept that I must face this dragon, fae, or demon with dignity. “We can certainly get that for you! The price will be _____.”
She begins to pay, I shit thee not, with golden dollar coins. We are a block from Wall Street, and this eldritch demi-being is paying for an unholy elixer with golden coins. My life will end soon, I am sure of it.
“Do you still have the ‘Add Energy’ packets?”
My heart began to race at this request. “Yes ma’am.”
“How many can I add?”
Futile though it is, at least I know the rote response to this. “For health reasons, we won’t add more than one per drink and we cannot sell the packets individually.”
“One then.”
I alter the order and tell her the new price. She pays, dumps the change and five golden dollars into the tip box. I write the order on the venti cup and pass it silently to the girl working the hot beverage station. Normally we called and pass, but this was … not something to be spoken aloud.
My fellow takes the cup, not thinking anything of the minor break with protocol, until she sees the order. She stares at me. “No.”
The woman, which I call her for no other greater insight into her terrifying being is within my grasp, simply stands on the other side and says, calmly but with a commanding tone I expect of Admirals in bad movies, “Yes.”
My fellow barista pales before her task. But we are dutiful, we are true to our task, great though it may be. She sets about clearing the two brand new Matrena’s of all distraction, and sets two tall cups in the ready position. The energy packet is emptied into the venti cup, and the shots begin pouring.
The barista was damn near shaking. This woman’s gaze felt like the fires of the sun. Finally, the shots are pulled, the cup is filled, and the hand off takes place.
Our visiting Incomprehensible takes it to our milk bar and adds a dollop of cream. Satisfied, she proceeds to down what must have been half the damn cup.
Then she smiled at us, like a benediction and I was honestly filled with joy. And horror. She left, and we knew nothing more of her after that.
When I talk with other former employees, we quickly begin talking about “The Company” as if we’d never l, perhaps knowing that part of our soul still powers that awesome and terrible corporate machine. And when I share this stroy, other Baristas at first act shocked but quickly settle and comes the chorus,
“Yeah, I had one like that.”
Okay, Starbucks lore is my new favorite genre of literature. Please collect all these and more into a book.
…I thought Venti Espresso Cryptid was a fever dream my manager had. Good lord.
also while im waiting for my tea to steep, since im petty, and they cant fire me any more than they already have i can tell you about the Button That Makes You Lie To People because i CANNOT stop thinking about it and its driving me fucking nuts
i worked at a fancy gourmet coffee shop, but not everyone who came in knew that or cared, so we’d occasionally get ppl who got all their coffee knowledge from starbuckses. starbuckae? starbukakke
anyway sbux has this thing where they’re literally just wrong about what they call some drinks. for example, a cappuccino is traditionally a double shot of espresso with milk foam, like a few sips of drink, but at starbucks the smallest possible “cappuccino” is 8oz and espresso with that much milk? is really just a bastard latte.
but to explain that to someone who doesnt know better takes time, and there a line forming, and a latte… is close enough to what someone who thinks of a cappuccino as a 16oz drink is expecting.
so if someone asked for a “large cappuccino” we were instructed to go “okay :)”, plug in a large latte, and then, before they could see, scroll down to the secret buttons, the forbidden buttons, the deceit buttons, and press the one called “cappuccino”, in “quotes”, which would not only put a cappuccino on their receipt, but would send a message to the barista, across the room, who would then make a latte, see the pink “cappuccino” indicator, and go
“large cappuccino? :)”
and i just, like, that’s just, i love how, food is made up and not real
wupacing 