Barista refuses the Skinny
- January 5, 2008
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Starbucks has begun offering “skinny” drinks that are served with skim milk, sugar-free syrup, and no whipped cream. As The Consumerist pointed out, this seems like sort of a non-news story since you can already order anything you want at Starbucks, no matter how wacky or expensive.
But at least one Starbucks coffee jockey has written a fiery (read: hilarious) manifesto saying she refuses to use the new “skinny” moniker, citing among other reasons her concern that people will get offended by this politically incorrect label and will sue.
So if I order my coffee black, does that mean an African-American customer could get offended and sue? Has that what what this society has come to? Imagine the horror if there’s a mixed African-American/Caucasian in the store when someone orders a White Chocolate Mocha!
(My favorite comment from the Consumerist post: “Is she gonna complain about ‘WARNING: HOT’ written on coffee cups because not everyone is hot?”)
No, the sad part is, people won’t get offended but for the wrong reasons. We’ve been trained quite effectively to speak “Starbucksese”, gladly ordering a “Venti” instead of a “Large”, so that we somehow don’t feel ripped off by paying $4 for a cup of coffee. Every time I order my black coffee “with room” (to reduce the chances of spillage), I die inside just a little, knowing that I purposefully asked for less product for the same amount of money. But we’ve come to accept our fate in exchange for our caffeine fix to the point where they could call it a “Super Deluxe Hairy Mole Rat Latte with Half-Calf” and we would order it proudly.
(The Consumerist is also reporting of at least once instance where a locally-owned coffee shop’s business went through the roof when a Starbucks opened next door. Starbucks, they reasoned, did the marketing for them to attract the customers, but then the customers went next door for their coffee when the Starbucks lines were too long. No word on whether the locally-owned coffeehouse offended their customers with politically-incorrect coffee lingo.)
