I have a theory that there is no caffeine in coffee sold by Costa coffee and other Starbucks clones. The trick is in making the ordering process so stressful that you’re already buzzing by the time you’ve left the queue, such as it is.
- First, the member of staff leaves the café, ensuring they have no eye-contact whatsoever with the customer.
- Second, they shout in an indeterminate accent something indecipherable of which the general gist is, “Good morning. What would you like?”. Every month, the company issues a list of phrases which only sound good said in an American accent.
- You give your order, half-way through which process the member of staff starts shouting to another more overworked member of staff to start the coffee machine up so that no further part of the order can be heard.
- You give your order again as they didn’t hear it properly the first time.
- You give your order again, this time to a third member of staff who was trained this morning how to use the till.
- You give your order again, as the third member of staff is also dealing with three other orders.
- You pay by major credit card as your bank machine doesn’t let you take out that much money at once.
- You can’t find a seat. In any case, it’s taken so long to get this far that it’s time to go back to work.
- Any cream or foam will have disappeared by the time you reach your desk. You forgot the sugar and anything to stir it with.
Spot on. But you missed the fact that staff tend to greet a request for ‘a medium black coffee’ with blank incomprehension. (I’d be happy to ask for a Medio Americano if the staff were Italian, or if I were in Italy, but on a rainy morning in Scotland it seems horribly innapropriate.)
It is quite amazing, isn’t it, that a shop that SPECIALISES IN COFFEE is totally unable to make the simplest of caffeine based beverages, ie. made with water and in a mug- and I mean a proper mug. Mugs are not skinny, or tall. They are mugs, which is coincidentally what you feel like after you hand over your cash.
Decoration and Resignation
The flip side of this is, of course, when (true story) I’m sitting in a proper italian cafe (in Rome no less) and the friend I’m with (who is obviously a coffee expert having done Starbucks’ (or someone similar) training) says “I’d get fired for making a cappuccino like that. There’s too much coffee in the foam”