Tag: coffee

  • How Starbucks lost me as a regular

    Always a sad sight!
    I love coffee. More accurately, I love vanilla soy lattes with an extra shot of espresso

    (and usually extra vanilla).

    I pass two different coffee shops on my way to/from work every day. One is a lovely independent joint called Burlap & Bean. The other is a Starbucks. (Used to pass three, but then the Saxby’s turned into a Verizon Store. And really, there are two more – the coffee bar in Wegmans, and another Starbucks in Target – but they require a short-but-awkward detour from my commute, so they don’t count.)

    For some reason, no matter where you caffinate, lattes are ridiculously overpriced, and there are surely wiser ways to spend my money, but they just make me happy – the perfect balance of espresso and foamy faux-milk and vanilla sweetness just makes mornings feel a little less morning-y – and driving right by them every day… and since it’s usually just my boss and I in the office, stopping for coffee is often the most human interaction I’ll get all day – plus, if you use a registered Starbucks card, they give you soy and flavored syrups for free, so I end up stopping most days.

    But yesterday, I saw an email from Starbucks.

    It starts out all nice and cheery – when you earn a free drink, instead of sending a postcard you have to bring in, they’re going to put it right on your Starbucks card now, and it’ll also be good for food if you’d prefer, and you get a freebie every 12 drinks instead of 15!

    Cool.

    Except keep reading, and you get to this:

    O_O

    Well… Starbucks, I’ll miss you…

    But if you think I’ll sit idly by while you effectively jack the price up on my coffee by $1.10 a cup, you’ve got another thing coming. (Hint: It isn’t me, into your store.)

    • Yes, I could skip the vanilla, or find a cheaper drink.
    • Yes, I could just drink the office coffee slightly more often.

      • (And I probably will do both of those.)

    • Yes, the other coffee shops charge just as much.

    But the thing is, that $1.10 difference was the factor that won you my near-exclusive patronage, and dare I say, even loyalty. But without that, you’re just another coffee shop. And frankly, your the big, corporate, international, chain coffee shop (with almost 20,000 stores) – versus the little local, one-of-a-kind, independent Burlap & Bean (and even the regional, one-of-90-stores, not-a-cafe-but-has-one Wegmans). All else being equal, I’d rather support the little guys. And guess what? You just made all else pretty much equal.

    So, I’ll miss you, Starbucks.

    I’ll miss the perfect – reliably perfect – deliciousness of your triple grande vanilla soy lattes.

    I’ll miss the very fun and friendly baristas at the Starbucks location I frequent, who know my name and my drink and give me movie recommendations.

    I’ll even miss being able to pay for my coffee with a barcode on my cellphone.

    But it will be nice to shift more of my support to a local business, not have to deal with that god-awful parking lot of yours, and get my coffee 15 minutes sooner (on the now-less-common days I do stop for coffee) since I pass Burlap & Bean earlier on my commute.

    Sure, I’ll stop by sometimes, especially as iced coffee season rolls around (assuming you don’t take the free soy away from that too), but not nearly as often as I have been. You’re giving up your advantage, and losing a regular. I don’t expect you’ll care, but I also don’t expect that I’m the only lactose-intolerant and/or flavored-coffee-loving customer whose business you’ll be largely losing, so thought I’d at least let you know.

    Any time you want to reconsider, I’ll come gleefully running back, but until then, you’re just another coffee shop – competing on slightly-less-than-equal footing at that.

    *sigh*

     

    PS: ATTENTION ALL COFFEE SHOPS! Charging for soy milk (unless you offer some other lactose-free “milk”), just seems kind of mean… like a tax on people with faulty digestive tracts. =(

  • #NASAtweetup: North Carolina, apparently

    Fueled up the car and the humans… 1/3 of the way there! (halfway to our intermediate destination, a 2 hour stop in Charleston so Dad can to some work at a boat there.

  • Cafe Storyrant… Go!

    I win at cappuccino foam! (For once!)

    Oy. What a long week! I worked 8 of the past 9 days, and this week was all long shifts. So, yay for actually getting money, but boo for sore feet and tired me.

    So here’s a funny story. Not really funny, really, but a story anyway. Yesterday I was supposed to work an 8 hour shift in the middle of the day – three hours overlapping with the girl who opened, 2 hours by myself, and then 3 hours overlapping with the girl who would close. I was supposed to take my break when the closer got in, but about half an hour before the opener was to leave, I realized I had to pee, and was really hungry, and didn’t want to wait 2 and a half more hours to take my break, so I asked her if she’d mind if I took it then, I’d just take a half hour instead of the whole one, and I’d be back when she had to leave. She didn’t mind, so that’s what we did. And THANK FREAKING GOD.

    Apparently, the girl who was scheduled to close had called out, but somewhere along the line the wires got crossed and that little tidbit of information never made it to the manager who was actually working then, or to me, or to anyone actually working that day, and neither she or the manager she had talked to found a sub. So, about halfway through what originally would have been my break, the manager figured this out and called a couple people, but nobody could/would come in to close, so he asked me if I’d stay to close. Luckily for them, I didn’t have any pressing plans that would warrant leaving them with an unstaffed cafe for the rest of the evening, so I said I would.

    It was only an extra two hours of work, but on top of an already 8-hour shift, that’s a long time to be standing around making coffee. And instead of two hours working alone, it turned into 7, and I still had to do the food pull for the next day (normally done at the end of the middle shift, when the closer gets in, so one can wait on customers while the other’s in the back), plus do all of the closing stuff, which is a pain in the butt to begin with. Luckily for me, it was pretty slow most of the night, so I was able to get it done anyway, and they sent some people over from the book side at the very end to help me finish up. So everything crucial got done, the place got clean, and I still made it out of there reasonably soon after the store closed. It wasn’t that bad, and the manager bought me lunch today for being willing to stay.

    This morning I get in, working on the book side, and the other manager mentions I had forgotten to put more iced coffee in the fridge, but he had apparently been the one who had dropped the ball in the first place in not letting anyone know the girl wasn’t coming in, so it was all good. I said, “whoops, sorry, I’ll try to remember that next time,” and life moved on. I helped some customers, shelved some books, didn’t have to work the register much, it was a good day… until 5.

    Then the girl who was closing the cafe showed up. From the very beginning, I could tell she was going to be stressful to work with. The other cafe workers warned me, the cafe supervisor warned me, every time I opened, I could tell if she had been the one to close the previous night, because everything was messy and half-assed, if done at all. I tried to be polite when I saw her, but was grateful that I only had to work with her twice so far. I didn’t think I’d have to worry about it today, since I was on the other side of the store, but I was wrong. Soon after she arrived, she wanted to tell somebody something on the radio. Instead of just turning on the one we keep in the cafe, she tells me, halfway across the store, to pass on the message for her. She mumbles (rather consistently) so I couldn’t hear what she said, so I walk towards her and ask her what she said. Instead of repeating it like a normal person, she grabs the mic on my headset, while it’s still attached to me, and tells whatever to whoever herself, completely demolishing any semblance of personal space in the process. >.<

    A little while later, I’m helping out on register, and she comes over and just stands there awkwardly… already I have a bad feeling about this. She rings up a couple people too, eventually the line dies down, so I try to head back out to the floor to finish the pile I was shelving, but before I can manage that, she corners me and starts going off on me about how bad I did at closing. At first I think maybe I did forget a few things, I was by myself and already tired, it’s plausible. But then she asks me how I got Sunday from Thursday (refering to the expiration stickers we stick on the food trays, everything gets either one or two days from when you pull them out of the freezer), and then tries to claim half of it didn’t have a sticker at all. I admit to her I may have missed a tray or two, but I’m pretty sure I got almost everything, and I know I didn’t put Sunday stickers on anything. (When in doubt, I just tagged it for the next day, to be on the safe side, so almost everything had Friday stickers.) It would have been one thing if she was correcting me on things I had actually done wrong, (and even then, she doesn’t actually have any authority over me, I would just have respected it since she has been there longer than I) but NONE OF IT WAS TRUE.

    When I told this story to the cafe supervisor (who actually quit, effective yesterday, but we text), she confirmed that the girl has no room to talk… “A lizard could close the cafe better than her”… and both the managers who I’ve worked with lately told me I’m a good worker and doing a great job at my job(s), so I’m pretty confident that I didn’t screw up, and she’s just crazy.

    Nonetheless, when she was done, I was so so so very mad… Somewhere between shock and actual restraint, I managed not to say or hit anything, but that meant it came out as tears of frustration, so I went back to the break room, but there was a guy in there, so I stood at the sink and washed my hands so I had an excuse to face the wall and steam/cry a little… but this was like, 10 minutes before the end of my shift, so when I came back in to clock out and he was still there, I still wanted to rid myself of the grime of other people’s money and dusty books and computers that everyone-and-their-mom has touched before I got my stuff and left, so he gave me a funny look and asked “didn’t you just wash your hands?” and I was still barely maintaining my composure/sanity, so I just sort of muttered “yup” and some failed summary of the above explanation and left awkwardly.

    But now I’m home, showered, pajama’d, and soon will be asleeeeep. And tomorrow will involve no work, but lots of funnesses.