A friend of mine who used to work at a McDonalds told me that African American customers almost always ordered the fillet o’fish sandwich and an orange soda or mountain dew type drink. The weird thing about this is that my 16 year old son is black, adopted in Jamaica as a baby and raised with us in a white home. He also much prefers sprite or orange soda to cokes and also likes the filet o’ fish. He also says “birf” instead of “birth.” Go figure.
In Jamaica, very few people drink coffee, presumably because of the many years of influence from the British. They tend to drink tea. Also, they make a lot of money selling Blue Mountain coffee to Japan and the US so they export it instead of consume it, I’m guessing. They don’t eat chocolate, either (again, they export the cocoa I think). When I lived in Trinidad and Tobago, though, also mostly black, many of my co-workers and friends there drank coffee.
I am white, but I also find that I get sleepy after drinking a few cups of coffee quickly. It doesn’t work to keep me awake for road trips, so I avoid it when I’m driving. Do others have this paradoxical effect?
My mother drank coffee, my black wife can’t get started in the morning without it, and I will drink it on occasion. Black and white, the staff in my office lives on it.
I worked in a McDonald’s for a couple of summers, and can anecdotally confirm this. Black customers are more likely, overall, to order orange soda and Dr. Pepper. (Usually Dr. Pepper as a substitute for what they actually asked for, which was Mr. Pibb, and which we did not have at my particular location.) Of course we had white customers who ordered orange soda, and black customers who ordered Coke, but if I’d ever bothered to graph it out, I’m pretty sure you would have seen a distinct trend demonstrating that black customers are more likely to order orange soda. No idea why.
Did not notice the Filet o’ Fish thing, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
I’m late to the game, as usual, but I’ll contribute anyway.
I’m a black male who has always hated coffee. I can tell you that I’ve had, quite literally, three cups of coffee in my entire life. Twice as a child living with my grandmother (who, like my mom, loved coffee), and once at a 3am Denny’s stop about 10 years ago when I was desperate. I despise coffee. I also despise all chocolate, which is something I assumed was related for many years, but that appears to not be the case among other coffee-haters I know.
I get all my caffeine from soda. A Pepsi first thing in the morning (and one at lunch) does wonders for my day. And yes, I love me some orange soda, but I can’t say I’m a big Filet O’ Fish fan.
I’ve never even heard of this phenomenon. In every workplace I can remember—at least the office/technical positions—my black co-workers have guzzled the java on a pace with us white folks.
Then again, I don’t remember serving a whole lot of coffee to black customers when I waited tables. They were the only ones that asked if we had orange or grape soda, however. So there you go. Pretty conclusive.
What an odd thing to think about. Ture story: I was at Starbuck’s last Friday near my work. All three people working there were black. The guy in front of me was black. The two couples behind me in line were black. Even the woman going through the drive through was black. If it weren’t for the white girl reading her laptop in the back, I’d have been the only white person in the place. I guess it never occured to me that black people didn’t like coffee.
Black people don’t like coffee/
I work at a pretty ethnically balanced place, and we hang aroung the coffee maker more than we do the water cooler…
At our pot lucks, I am more likely to show up with fried chicken than my more melanin enhanced co-workers… (Norwegian/scottish background here)
next you will be claiming that irish people like to drink… (hell, we all know that its really the norwegians)
FML
Remember the show “Good Times”? They had a neighbor who was this real sexy (black) lady who always seemed to be on a new boyfriend. I remember once she was at the Evans apartment, and Florida asked her how she liked her coffee. She said, “Like I like my men – hot, black and strong!” So, we have black people in combination with coffee. (Of course, the show was produced by Norman Lear, who’s white. And Jewish; and as you know, every single deli is owned by the Jews, so of course they’re pushing coffee.)
I doubt it. My grandmother and aunt were cleaning ladies, my grandmother for several different clients. The clients always provided the products, which as I understand it, is how it is traditionally done.
