Surely I can't be the only one who is growing fatigued with the topic of Starbucks baristas misspelling customers' names on their drink cups. This phenomenon is a seemingly endless source of articles on snack-sized social media sites like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post. (Although I grant you that the most recent of these really is astonishing. Customer's name: Virginia. Word written on cup: Vagina.) It has even been addressed in a Saturday Night Live parody ad.
Presumably in an attempt to avoid such PR disasters, many times when you order at Starbucks, you will be asked to not only provide your name but spell it as well. I can't be the only one who is exasperated by this extra step.
One thing I have noticed is that the names rarely get called out when the barista sets out the drink. It's not a "tall Americano with room for Erika," it's just a "tall Americano with room." This puts the burden of name-checking on the customer. And frankly, we apparently just do not care enough to bother. I have taken other people's identical drinks by mistake. Last weekend, someone took my identical drink by mistake. Who cares?
The problem, of course, is with inattentive (or deliberately rude) people who swoop in and snatch drinks out of order. This mainly happens because the end of the bar is a vague, nebulous area where people hover in a sort of semi-circle, not counting those who go off to find tables right away, or those blundering through the area in search of sugar packets or napkins.
So that's one idea: make the line at the end of the bar as orderly as the line at the register. Another option would be to issue tickets or stamps or numbers or some other identification. "Tall Americano with room for number 102." Maybe Starbucks could start handing out tiny chalkboards, and we could all just write our own names on these tokens which would then be clipped to our cups.
Or maybe we should all just lighten up, and let the coffee drinks fall where they may.
Image courtesy Flickr/Jeremy Bailey
0 comments