Huh?
As for the price of a tall small coffee, who the fuck cares? I normally don’t drink coffee, and when I do, I don’t go to Starbucks if I can help it.
The vanilla iced tea thing is $2.65, as it turns out. (For a tall. Which I think they don’t have at the place I usually get them.*) A totally outrageous price for that creamy, dreamy, delicious, drool.
And I was hyperbolizing with that $5.72. It’s really $5.71. Happy now? 
*I never go into Starbucks, and yet I have a regular place? What’s up with the contradiction? Patience, my sweet. I shall tell you.
For several years my GF and I went to a particular beach every week. She would drive. There was a Starbucks drivethrough on the way back. She insisted on going there every time. I could have stuck to my principles and refused to go, asking that she drop me off in at the corner while she drove through. Or I could have stayed in the car, kept my mouth shut, and looked at the menu to see if anything ticked my fancy. Guess which one I did?
There is not a single drink on the Starbucks menu that runs $5.72 for a tall.
To the OP, I worked in a coffee shop for the past year and I dealt with this sort of irritating shit every day. I posted my own Pit thread once and was banned for a month as a result.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a real classism and hostility around the SDMB toward retail workers; any hint of a complaint and you’ll get dogpiled on like in this thread for what an asshole you are for having the gall to complain. :rolleyes:
Only traitors who are ashamed of the words hum it, real Americans sing it loud and as clear as the flag shining through the Dawn’s Early Light.
This makes no sense; are you perfhaps referring to the Americano, a drink made with espresso and hot water? Cappuccino is foamed milk.
Bullshit. There’s real sympathy for retail workers here. There’s only hostility towards stupidity.
And for added irony, if you want black coffee that isn’t espresso in France, you normally order a cafe Americain…
Which is the only way to drink coffee, by the way! (says the anti-elitist, pro-revolutionary front of Judea)
I’m with you except for the part I bolded. Are there more than three sizes? Because if not, medium is pretty much universal for the size in between the biggest and the smallest. I’ve been to Starbucks probably three times in my life and don’t know or care to know the vernacular. I wouldn’t dream of being an ass like the Cranky Old Man in the OP, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say “I’d like a medium coffee” and expect the server (excuse me, barista) to know what size I’m referring to.
Perhaps I don’t circulate with the “right crowd”, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t find Starbuck’s menu / ordering process pretentious and ridiculous.
But Folger’s has the best advertising slogan ever: “Mount ‘n’ groan!”
I’ve had them correct me on occasion. It’s annoying. Large means the cup you have that holds the largest amount of liquid, whatever name you call it. It doesn’t happen very often, but I can’t help but get a little snarky with the girl who corrects me with “you mean venti”, especially the one who gave me the “you’re a moron” look with it.
But yeah, the guy in the OP who started ranting about good ol’ American coffee would have had me straining not to roll my eyes at him. Just order a black coffee. The world will keep turning.
There are actually four sizes. The three that you see on the menu and the mysterious “short”, which is the size of a normal “small” coffee. They don’t advertise it but they will sell you a “short” if you ask for it.
No, I’m with you. But, I’m sure this scenario has played out many times:
Customer: “I’d like a small/medium/large coffee”
Server: “Here go you,” and hands customer a tall/grande/venti
Customer (whose coffee is probably larger than expected, particularly in the early days of Starbucks when people weren’t used to jumbo coffees): “This isn’t what I asked for. I wanted Small!”
Server: “Well, um, this is tall, which is the same thing.”
Customer: “I asked for small. Not this.”
So, I think that clarification is necessary, particularly for new customers. So many people have notions of what a small/medium/large should be, that getting the customer to order specifically the sizes as posted helps to prevent frustration in the long run.
Not classism, just a memory of when WE worked retail and had to put up with the same or more shit that you younguns bitch about. Sure, we bitched, too, but not on the internet (mostly because it wasn’t around back then) and certainly not publicly. We all thought our customers were jerks, too, but are older with a better understanding of of why they behaved like jerks and sympathy for the ones who were long-suffering, though we know that some of them were just jerks. And in some cases we resent being treated like jerks by some asshole in an apron who thinks he’s oh-so-very-clever, like the OP. If I were his manager and overheard him mouth off to a customer like that he’d be fired on the spot in front of the customer he insulted.
And Starbucks is the most stupidly pretentious place this side of a French restaurant.
No, what I’m referring to is the “American Style” coffee you get overseas. Coffee Americana, Coffee Americano… I think I’ve seen it both ways. In all cases, it is the tasty local coffee made undrinkable by cutting it by a third or a half with hot water. Seriously.
I plan to market it in the US as Freedom Coffee™. Do not violate my trademark!
I think fetus is right to bitch. He got a guy who acted like an idiot, and didn’t get to unload on him at the time, so he’s following up here. While he should be thankful he’s not getting stabbed by a semen-covered psycho, I think was customer was annoying nough for a pit thread.
I also used to do a variation on “coffee-flavored coffee,” which is at least ten, and probably 15 years old now, but I’ve switch to asking the server “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’.” I don’t like Starbucks coffee that much. I get coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, usually, or a little cafe near me whoen I feel like splurging. If someone tool me to Starbucks, and it was relly bothering me, I’d rant at the person who brought me. That’s the person who is there by choice.
Uh, and I’m sure it hasn’t. People don’t think of “small” drinks as being a universal standard size, we know it just means the smallest of three size choices.
I’m sure it HAS happened, but only up to the point where the customer says, “Really? So THAT’S why a ‘small’ costs so much.”
You mean in this thread where you started out in your OP telling everyone we’d better be nice to you or you’d fuck with our coffee?
You were *suspended *(not banned) for being a troll and a fucking dick in that three-page trainwreck, not for complaining.
Oh, like in this other thread where you call everyone who doesn’t stay at home on holidays an asshole? You pretty much had your ass handed to you by the poor suffering proles you were so gallantly trying to defend.
OPs get piled on for being belligerently stupid, not because of any classism or elitism. If you could look past your own elitism, you’d see that.
Not always. I tried to get my Dad ‘a short of whatever your lightest roast brewed coffee is’ at Starbucks in Mandalay Bay on the weekend and they said they didn’t have short. So I got him a ‘small cup of whatever your lightest roast brewed coffee is’ instead. Presumably that was a ‘tall’. But I don’t drink coffee, so I don’t feel compelled to learn Starbucks nomenclature - I’d just read about the ‘short’ as a way to get a smaller than usual cup of coffee somewhere else, and thought I’d try it.
The customer was annoying for complaining about something that the OP had no control over.
The OP can feel free to vent all he like but should realise that the customer’s behaviour was barely worth of a Pit thread, if that.
People who complain about the way Starbucks names it’s sizes should really learn to flex those brain cells a bit harder. I mean come *on * - how hard can it be to figure out which is their smallest drink and which is their largest? WTF does it *matter * what they call their sizes - they could call them “Flimple”, “Poofly” and "Funbung"and anyone with a pulse should be able to order without any trouble.