Yesterday the Christians, who will buy anything that has the Made by Jesus label, today the yuppies who buy anything with the Starbucks label. Actually, the incident was on Sunday morning. Two yuppie-wannabes came in. The male pointedly asks me about a “rumor” he has heard, that some Barnes and Nobles have actual Starbucks cafes, and some Barnes and Noble only happen to sell some Barnes and Noble products. I dont’ know about the other stores, but i confirmed that our cafe just sold Starbucks coffee, and was owned by Barnes and Noble. I don’t care much, as they are both corporations out to steal my soul.
The very testoterone packed male order a grande white mocha and the woman ordered a short cafe a lait. In other words, a large and a small. I get fed up with all of the shorthand speak that many of these people try to use, as it only confuses me, and often they are only aping things that they read in magazine articles or saw in commercials. I left after serving these two, after Liz came back from her break, only to be called back ten minutes later, because they wanted a refund. The man said that it did not taste like they expected it to taste. It was not up to Starbucks’ standards. I made no argument, merely handing them their money without looking him in the eye, let alone smiling. The simple fact is that it is Starbucks coffee, and it tasted just fine. These two yuppie-wannabes wanted to show that they could tell the difference between real Starbucks and a knockoff brand by tasting, and only fooled themselves. I might not have thought that, other than the man askign those silly questions about our cafe being a real Starbucks or not. The only difference is which pocket of which CEO it goes in!
It didn’t help that he had a crumpled newspaper in his hand when he was getting the refund, a newspaper that came out of our racks, a newspaper that he did not buy, a newspaper that we would not be able to sell because of its condition yet we’d still have to pay for the vendor for. I care nothing for the money that Barnes and Noble lost, but of the hypocrisy of these elitist pricks who want to one-up the poor, hourly wage employees.
For that matter, there was another peice on NPR’s Weekend Edition that annoyed me, by some writer who was mad at the impersonal manner of employees in fast food restaurants. He came down hard on the employees, completely forgetting that these people barely get paid to do this hot, oily, thankless work, for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who will buy a Whopper, then demand why it doesn’t taste more like a Big Mac. His conclusion? “Maybe fast food isn’t so fast.” How do these hacks get airtime? He then went on to end the piece about the blank, unsympathetic stares that the workers give the customers, totally ignoring the fact that most often that blank stare is only a mirror of what they are seeing. Need a villain to blame? Why not the corporation who sells poor quality food, and a government that lets the corporations get away with paying less than a working wage? Oh, wait, i get it. I hate those little hats that those workers wear too, especially those tennis hats… but the corporations bought those too.
What I’m listening to this morning is an album that i picked up for free, a promo sent to the bookstore, Bebel Gilberto “Tanto Tempo”. Mellow, spacey, Latin. Decent backgroudn music, although it doesn’t get inside my soul and nurture it. It just drifts along in the background, an empty medium to travel through. I put it on the stereo originally to relax and calm down, but it doesn’t seem to be achieving that effect at all. Some of the less Latin jazz sounds actually irritate me, but on the whole, I like Gilberto’s voice. Hell, sometimes it could be Stereolab, even though it is probably getting packaged as world music.