I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that, given the same equipment, I could brew a cappucino every bit as good as yours. As for a Big Mac, give me the training and I’ll learn that too. We’re talking about entry level jobs that are planned and designed specifically so that people with no skills can do them successfully.
Coffee joints are just fast food joints, nothing more. There’s nothing about being a “Barista” any more impressive than working at Pizza Hut. Bet I can make a better pizza than you.
Not necessarily. It depends on who you’re serving it to and how particular they are about their coffee, but quality can vary a lot between one barista and another, even if they’ve both been making coffees for the same amount of time. I’ve known customers who will ONLY get their coffee from certain baristas, and will simply go without if that barista isn’t working. It might seem counter-intuitive, particularly if you’re the sort of person who’s just looking for that jolt of caffeine to get you started, but there’s a lot of little things that go into making someone’s coffee just the way they like it.
[Grandpa Simpson] Damn straight! Had a friend who called me offering me a job. I asked him if they let him wear his earring, the hotshot Chief Engineer and all. He said “No.” And that was, oh, four long years ago and a LOT has changed since then. [/Grandpa Simpson] :rolleyes:
Trust me, punk, there’s a lot of us who were brought up Old Skool and we’ll be your bosses for decades to come. Don’t fuck with us.
Where’s the “Me and my generation have the power of life and death over you kids!” smilie when I need it?
You’ve got that completely backwards. No customer is ever going to be able to talk to the founder of Starbucks. They are speaking to the person paid to be the one interacting with the public on behalf of the company. IF you can’t handle that responsibility, costumer service is not the place for you.
The guy was placing an order and was trying to be witty. If he failed, you know what, who cares? Someone working a counter should never make a joke about a customer no matter what. The proper response to this order would have been something like, “We can do that kind of coffee too!” “I can tell you’re a man who knows what he exactly what he wants,” or “Not a problem, it’s just less buttons for me to push on the Robojava 3000 back here,” “So, one John Doe Joe – we give everything a fancy name, some people like that,” or “You can’t be any more pure coffee lover than that.” Or, if you don’t have the energy for any of that, a simple “coming right up” will do.
“Training”? What are they, labrador retreivers?
The person working behind the bar at a coffee shop is a human being with a job to do, just like me. I’ll talk to him like he’s an equal, not an automaton, and I expect him to speak to me the same way.
Shows how wrong we were for thinking the OP “barista” (“My, ain’t we posh, sitting around the grand pianer…”) worked for Starbucks.
Would you like fries with that Vente Mac? Whadda have to call the folks slinging burgers? Crapistas?
I saw them referred to as “burgeros” the other day, which had a jaunty flair to it.
The word ‘training’ is perfectly valid for referring to the process of being taught work operational procedures, particularly in sectors with a high expectation of ‘by the book’ work routine, such as franchised food retail.
What may or may not happen when you order a “regular” coffee in Rhode Island don’t mean a damn thing. Dozens of people that same day asked me or my coworkers for a “medium coffee” and got exactly what that man got, without needing to go on a diatribe. If he were confused–and it’d be pretty damn hard to be confused about that if you ask me–he could’ve asked, instead of shitting all over me and my profession.
Every single comment regarding confusion re drink sizes is irrelevant, and many other posts are all about Starbucks in some other way.
Other than seeing our logo all over the menu, you mean?
Agreed. I’ve never asked a customer if they wanted something in decaf except for clarification. Decaf is a minority taste, and if you wanted it you’d have asked for it.
Nobody said that blue-collar workers are the only people who feel that way–it’s just a bourgeois and jaded way of looking at the world of short-order coffee, so to speak. Anyway, when you go to a car dealership do you unload your tirade about that industry on the salesman before you pick out your car? When you go to Best Buy do you rail about the crimes of computer retail to the pimple-faced college kid serving you? How about when you go to the hospital? Do you make the nurses listen to a speech about the state of American medicine, or do you shut up and let them do their job, giving them whatever information they need to hear from you and maybe making pleasant (ie, not condescending or dehumanizing) conversation with them?
Not without practicing for a good while. Wait, no, you’re right–how could I possibly know? It’s not like I do it for a living, or anything. I’m just some dumb coffee slave. I didn’t say you didn’t have the mental capacity to do my job if you had the training and practice. But you don’t have the training or the practice–that’s why you have to come to me (well, someone like me) for a decent cappucino. I’ve spent time perfecting the skill while you’ve been doing other things. I didn’t say it was a highly technical job, I said that you couldn’t just jump over the counter and make your own cappucino and have it be as good as mine. That is different from McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, even though I don’t make much more than those guys per hour and I don’t need a degree to operate the steam wand.
No, he wasn’t. He was trying to be a jackass. How are you guys not understanding this? I was there. He wasn’t being funny. If anything, I was the one trying to be witty.
I order a “small coffee” or “medium coffee” in Starbucks all the time, and never once has an employee corrected me or been confused. Occasionally one will ask if I want room in the cup for cream and sugar (which I don’t) but that’s been the extent of the questioning.
I agree with the OP that the customer was a bit of a jerk, but I’m not sure I like the implication that anyone who wants plain coffee should drink Folgers or go to 7-11. Starbucks coffee is good plain; I would think that would be a point of pride for the company. I realize they make it strong because it’s usually mixed with, and therefore diluted by, several other ingredients. But I like my coffee strong.
Yeah, so? Chances are the staff is still “trained” to “encourage” brand recognistion. I worked in a bistro/cafe type establishment for one summer back in college, and yes, we were “trained” by management and if you were on cash there were things you had to say, and whoa was you if a manager was nearby and you didn’t. (“Training” is a valid HR term, by the way.)
An example would be whichever store always asks me: “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” when I get to the cash register. I’ll talk to the cashier as an equal sure, “How are you today?”, but the answer will be the automaton’s “Did you find everything youwere looking for today?” followed by “I’m fine thank you.”
I’d rather they just did away with the cutsey names and just stick with small, medium and large, but I don’t blame the kid behind the counter for doing his job.
Consumer Reports has just rated McDonald’s coffee higher than Starbucks’s.
fetus, you should post your rants at the Starfuck’s boards. I don’t know where I saw them (oh yeah, on the now defunct Trainwrecks blog review site) but there was an AWESOME one about people making their own ghetto mistos on the cheap.
fetus, I think that was my dad, who over the last few years has become exactly the sort of smug, condescending jerk who will, every time he has an opportunity, loudly go into a rant almost word-for-word the twin of your customer’s bit of rudeness. Coffee is his favorite target, but he’ll launch into a food variation at any restuarant more upscale than Applebee’s as well. My husband refuses to go out to eat in public with my parents anymore because he is always doing this these days. He’s not senile, he just seems to like being an asshole to the waitstaff these days. NOT the way he brought up us kids, btw.
That’s the thing, Starbucks has four sizes… Short, Tall, Grande and Venti.
The starbucks outside of my hotel here in Tokyo has Short, Tall and Grande on the menu, and I am not sure they have Venti cups, but the short, tall and grande are the exact same size they are in the US. In the US, they have Tall, Grande and Venti on the menu, and most drinks don’t come in a Short because nobody wants a coffee that small. The sizes are standardized, not relative, hence they have names. Tully’s does the same thing (although they might be Starbucks in disguise)
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Your job title might be “barista” but you’re still the flip-fry of the coffee world, javaboy.
Who said that? I drink plain coffee all day long, every day (although these days I usually pour espresso into it–it generally takes 6-8 shots to get through a couple chapters of homework at midnight after closing up at work). I rarely put cream or sugar in it–only if, knowing the blend well, I really feel it would enhance it (which is rare). But I wouldn’t be caught dead buying Folgers or 7-Eleven coffee. My point is this: if you’re going to be a jackass about your coffee, and you’re too emo to handle a specialty coffee shop, I’d rather you take your attitude elsewhere. I’d feel the same way if I owned the store.
It is. So is great customer service and respect for our clients. Respect is a two-way street, though.
Only very rarely is drip coffee mixed with other ingredients at a Starbucks (except for the cream and sugar the buyer may add). You’re probably thinking of the espresso, which 9 times out of 10 is mixed with milk and some combination of flavoring syrups or chocolatey sauces. But the espresso is brewed seperately from the drip coffee. No, the drip coffee is just strong because Starbucks wants to serve strong coffee. (FTR, the place I work at serves coffee in a much wider variety of strength, acidity, body, flavor, aroma, etc.)
I have no interest in cavorting with Starbucks employees. I respect them as honest workers, but it’s not my crowd at all.
I don’t know what that means, although I’ve heard it talked about as something served at Starbucks.
My dad doesn’t get on his soapbox like that, but he can be quite the embarrassment at public establishments as well. I won’t go into detail here, as the stories aren’t terribly interesting, but suffice it to say I feel for you.
Assuming that a small (tall, what the fuck ever) is 12 oz, a short is probably 8 oz, right? I’m sure if you ask, any Starbucks employee will make a drink 4 oz smaller for you. We do it all the time for kids’ drinks, and charge less accordingly.
Actually, my job title isn’t “barista”. You’re reading a lot of inflation in my self-evaluation that isn’t there. You can’t make a cappucino as good as mine if you haven’t had the training and experience. It’s a fact, and I guarantee an objective study based on the categories you compare such things by would prove it. Doesn’t mean it’s a skill that will take me very far, and it doesn’t mean I’m better than you. The fact that you read that into it says more about you than me.
Far as I can tell they’re the ‘highly trained’ individuals at Starbucks who put the coffee into the cup and take the money.
Having made all sorts of coffee myself, including all the fancy schmancy espresso-based drinks like non-fat dry cappuccino, I don’t see how it’s all that ‘hard’. It’s no harder than making a milk shake and we don’t give the people who work at the Dairy Queen cutesy titles.
I’d actually hate to see what Starbucks would do to a Kona. They tend to burn every pot of over-roasted coffee anyway.
And yet boringly, it only means twenty.
There’s a bar I go to that has it on a big sign at the door: ‘This is a bar. We don’t have a kids menu. We don’t make frou-frou drinks. We have beer and liquor. That’s how we roll here.’
I love that place, and they’re serious about the no kids’ menu thing. There is no kids’ menu, and no kids are welcome.
Really, it’s not that hard. Having done both, I still believe it’s no more difficult than making a milk shake.
“American coffee?” I apologize sir, but all our coffee is from exotic, far away lands. It’s grown on Colombian hillsides, the lush mountains of Kenya, or the sun kissed plantations of Hawaii. The coffee bean cannot be cultivated in American climes. I’'m sorry sir, but you will have to take your custom elsewhere.