Dear Starbucks Coffee Gurus,

After suffering with an insane addiction (lattes are my particular demise) for some time, I have come to terms with my dependence on your corporate machine.  While you probably employ countless researchers for the very purpose of evaluating customer trends, I frequent your establishment enough to offer some observations.  These may or may not be helpful to know.  (I’m going to tell you anyhow and consider it a therapeutic exercise:)

1.   It seems like a bit of a taunt when an individual orders a “non-fat” something or other and the fab Starbucks Smiley employee inquires if you still “want whip”? (Of course I want whip.  But even if I manage to hide the Starbucks receipts and, during monthly family budget meetings, insist that the price of toilet paper has increased substantially, I may have quite a time convincing my people that the extra layer on my butt is simply the newest trend in body shaping.)

2.  While caffeine junkies like me will wait for huge chunks of time (even if the idiot in front of us orders from a list of scribbles for the ENTIRE office & then he’s scrambling to figure out -to the penny- what each office-member owes him), we do indeed prefer to see a plethora of staff busily working on our fabulous coffees.  The more staff smiling at us, feeding our fragile egos as we wait for our dose, the better.

3.  It’s really great if one of the Starbucks Smilers asks which cranberry scone I want.  Because I didn’t want the little deformed one hiding in the back.

4.  When I’m at the back of the line and I’m stressed about being late and I’m stressed about using the bank card (my silly significant other actually thinks a person should have a “Starbucks budget” if you can imagine the indignity), when the Starbucks Till Person yells out to say hello, uses my name, asks if I’m still on my buying-funky-skull-shoes-&-shirts-rampage, and then inquires whether I’ll be getting my regular latte, or one with the half-sweet pumpkin stuff I really want… well, it completely makes being addicted very worthwhile.

Yours, dependently,

Deanna Kent-McDonald

p.s.  I really wish you guys would give “regular” writers (like me) the opportunity to write for your “the way i see it” thing… along with being in Vanity Fair one day, and appearing on Ellen, having my words on a Starbucks coffee cup would really do it for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 6:21 am. You can leave a comment below.