Wednesday, January 21, 2009

...and speaking of cults...

I have a confession to make: although I don't drink coffee, I adore the black shaken iced tea at Starbucks. However, I DETEST their pretentious pain in the arse way of re-naming cup sizes. Small is tall, medium is grande and large is venti. I mean, how Jim Jones.

For a little while, I played their silly game. Yeah, I ordered the venti black iced tea, but I'm fed up with it. For yonks now, I always order a LARGE. I make a point of saying LARGE and I never use their brainwashy corporate buzzwords. They'll repeat the order back to me using the word venti, but then I'll say, "yes, a large, please."

Now, while I have no desire to join the ranks of folk who consistently merit bonus ingredients in their food/bev orders at drive-through windows, I think on some level the barristas are sick of the Starbucks line of claptrap and approve of me bucking their little dog-and-bell system.

So, it's all the more savoury when I pull up to the speaker and they offer me the lastest mocha coffee beverage with bleu-cheese foam topping to muster my best rubesoisie accent and order my iced tea. Make that a large, please.

9 comments:

DBA Dude said...

You are not alone, I heard some comic on the radio the other week riffing on the same theme and it hit a note with a lot of listeners.

Have only ever been in a Starbucks once (to use the internet) and got around it by ordering an espresso!

g bro said...

You are such a rebel!

I love it when they recite the order back using all the ingredients as adjectives: "That's one venti, extra-shot, three-Splenda, head-room, skim-milk latte?"

Lori Stewart Weidert said...

Thanks for this; I HATE Starbucks venti/skinny/WTF jargon. I don't like their coffee, but I will occasionally stop in for a vanilla chai. God help me, I want it with skim milk, and sugar-free vanilla; it's like they can't wrap their minds around what I just ordered.

Bleu cheese foam topping cracked me up.

Zelda said...

I have never been able to bring myself to order their sizes either. I just can't. It's too silly. It's like all the pretenses of ordering a bottle of wine. I'm usually ordering the cheapest bottle anyway, so as long as it's not vinegar I don't need to sniff and gargle and bless it while announcing my findings.

NotClauswitz said...

Resist the Kultur of Corporate-Coffee assimilation! :-)

Buck said...

Yup... I did the small-medium-large thang, too, back in the day when there was a Starbucks in the building where I worked in SFO. Actually, I quit doing it since I'm SO completely frickin' predictable... same thing, coffee-wise, every day. The baristas got to know me after about a month or so and poured when they saw me hit the door. Nice, that. As were the occasional freebies, too, which is more about the personal relationships I had with those folks and less about the "corporate" crap.

Unknown said...

I only go in there for hot chocolate during the winter and also order it as a "medium." I'm still not even sure what their three sizes actually are and they also repeat it back to me in their language.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkpDEn7mGVY

Anonymous said...

I used to go into Starbuck's first store in Seattle's Pike Place Market and get a cup of the coffee of the day (GOOD drip coffee, that). It seemed like such fun to ask for a cup of black coffee, then the baristas started giving me the look like I was some kind of sicko... Well, I am, but that's another matter.