Summer Drinks vs. Winter Drinks

Now that the weather is changing, it's getting to be way fun to watch as people start to switch from the drinks they ordered all winter back to the drinks they order when it's warm out. It makes this season a little unpredictable, and adds a touch of mystique to my normally banal existence. (Just kidding! My life isn't that sad! Sometimes when I go out I switched from my normal burger to a steak! I'm unpredictable and cra-a-a-zy!)

The drinks are usually pretty similar, like a mocha to java chip frappuccino, or a caramel macchiato to a caramel frappuccino. We have one woman who normally gets a coffee with hazelnut syrup added to it who switches to a frappuccino version of the same. I personally like to drink 3 pump vanilla 3 pump classic soy no foam awake tea lattes in the winter (because pretentiousness is attractive) and sweetened passion tea lemonades in the summer (because despite how common they are, they're so dang good.)

For class, I put together an audio clip that's about this idea, complete with a few interviews.
Here it is:

audioproject sound bite

The Verdict is in...

...Making frappuccinos the new way is going to make me a very unhappy camper this summer.

Saturday, I almost enjoyed it. It was a slow night, since the Pens were playing, and I was working with a good group. And, for all that I may whine, actually making the Frappuccinos isn't as bad as I always think it's going to be. The consistency of the new versions are much more easy going, and it's a pretty easy going rhythm once you get it. Plus it's kind of fun giving our customers something that actually tastes as good as how much you paid for it to be. So if you'd asked me on Saturday? A little tougher, but not so bad that it couldn't be dealt with.

And then Sunday. Sundays just do not change. I know it seems like I have to be exaggerating, but seriously. Someone asked us if we sold Arizona's Arnold Palmer iced tea last Sunday. Sunday people are weird.

This Sunday was, despite the storms, pretty toasty. And, because of the storms, it was humid. "Perfect weather for a Frappuccino!" thought the world, and that's how sadness was invented.

I know it will get better with time, but right now our cold bar is so thoroughly thrown into a tightly knit shambles from all the extras we had to bring in that it's hard to keep things straight. The cramping at the bar makes things incredibly confusing, and now that we need to bring the cup with us along for the ride, I keep getting flabbergasted and lost. The extra steps means that I can't keep up with the orders easily, and for someone that prides herself on being pretty competent on bar, that's very frustrating. Worst of all is the multiples thing. I am so unused to not being able to blend more than one drink at a time, and it breaks my heart to get two grande Caramel Frappuccino Blended Coffee Beverages (yes, that's what we're supposed to be calling them. That's what we've always supposed to call them, but now they care again) and realize that I have to go through 965 steps for not one but two blenders and that I also have a vanilla bean, a mocha light and a green tea creme lined up and ready to go right after. And waiting for decaf shots is just as annoying as it was before.

But, again, a lot of those problems will disappear with time. And the soft launch should prepare us for what goes down once mid-May hits and the real fun begins, like Frappy Hour (I will tell you about Frappy Hour.) And actually, I am less upset about this new development than I was about the coffee cadence. We'll see how it goes, and how I feel about it in the summer.

Word of the Week

Every week, on Wednesdays, our paper and product orders come in. With all the excitement one would imagine comes with such a day, order day is a frenzy of box cutting and putting away and requires two or three extra people to work through it.
For whatever reason, possibly to keep the weeks straight, all of the boxes that we get in our product order are marked with a different word every week. The words rarely make sense and can range from "hope" to "sword" to "house" to whatever small, no more than two-syllable word you can find. Usually the words are pretty ignorable.

This weekend, however, I walked into work and saw this:

Oh Dear God Free Coffee Day

So as I recently found out, April 15 is going to be free coffee day. I found this out not at work but on a blog called StarbucksMelody, which is an awesome blog for anyone who wants real Starbucks news instead of some news way too late with extra whine thrown in.

According to the post, which yes, does depress me that I'm finding it out online instead of at work, on April 15, if you bring in your own tumbler, you get free coffee. I'm not too concerned, like I would have been for free pastry day. I think maybe 3 of our customers bring in their own tumblers, despite the fact that our store sells about 4 times that per week.

It is a little sad how unconcerned most of our customers are about going green. Starbucks has made several attempts to get there, as I've mentioned before, by eliminating the spoon jacuzzi, cutting back on sleeves (grumble, grumble), using less plastic in their cups, recycling in the downtown stores, and offering incentives to those that use their own cups (10 cents off, people! How can you ignore that?!)

But despite that, the company (and, in turn, its baristas) takes so much crap for not being green enough. It's not just the company, it's the community and the customers that can help too. You can whine about us all you want, but if you're hoping that we'll do enough "green" things to make up for the fact that you just pounded back 24 ounces of iced tea and tossed the cup, with a sleeve on it, directly into the trash...well, try again. And even if you do recycle that cup, it's not going to make up for the fact that we have a customer who regularly comes through and gets 4 venti mocha frappuccino lights, with extra ice and whipped cream, all of them double cupped and in a cardboard carrier.

(Actually, one of my favorite stories involves that woman's husband and my coworker, Matt, who isn't afraid to tell our customers exactly how he feels. The man had ordered that ridiculous order one night, and he and Matt had gotten into a discussion/argument about why she orders it that way and why she shouldn't. After they'd paid and the drinks had been finished, Matt abruptly ended the conversation, handed them their drinks, and said happily, "Oh, ok. Well, Happy Earth Day!")

Of course, our customers that do bring in their own cups are more poster children for crazy than for going green. One woman, who really is a nice person despite this, orders an extra extra dry nonfat cappuccino through the drive-thru. Personal cup drinks in the drive thru make me want to curse. It makes no sense to run the gas needed to sit in a drive thru lane just to either save 10 cents or to be green, and we can't start anything but the milk for your drink until you get to the window. The cappuccino is the worst, since there is nothing, at all, that we can start until she gets there.

Another woman brings in 5! Tumblers! at least twice a week. Four of them filled with drinks for herself, one for her daughter, and until we gently scolded her she used to come through the drive thru to order them, where she would inevitably cause a line.

Ah, then there was another favorite of ours who would bring in his many-weeks unwashed tumbler, still half full of the remnants of his last drink and ask us for a "wash job" before we filled it with a peppermint white mocha. He had us steam it to 200 degrees and served to him in a paper cup anyways, and he'd have us fill his milk-chunk tumbler with scalding hot water until the drink was finished, when we would pour out the water, pour in the white mocha, and give him the paper cup for him to drain the dregs. We haven't seen him for awhile; we think he crazied himself into an old folk's home. No one is upset.

So go out, buy a tumbler, get a WHOLE! FREE! COFFEE! for April 15, 10 cents off every other time, and maybe I'll get to meet a lot more people who use a tumbler and aren't crazy. Sounds like fun for everyone, right?

Important Announcement

If you are:

Male

and

Over 21

and

Drink Creme Based Frappuccinos

Then

Please don't have kids.

That is all, thank you.

Coming Soon to a Starbucks Near You!

So starting April 19, Starbucks everywhere will be soft launching their Summer Phase 1 promo, and hoo boy, it's a doozy.

Starting that day, it will be possible to completely customize your frappuccinos.

"Yeah, but like, I get my vanilla beans with caramel drizzle on it all the time, Emily," you may be thinking, "that's, like, already being customized, right?"

Well, true, person who would never be reading my blog (or reading anything, really). But starting soon, you'll be able to make your frappuccinos with any milk choice we have that you desire, including soy! and skim milk! You'll also be able to make them with any level of caffeine you desire without having to get a nasty tasting creme base-and-decaf-espresso concoction. You can now make them with any syrup, any milk, any dry inclusion we have, any amount of caffeine, and they finally taste good enough that even I can't complain (much)(you know I'm going to, though. It's coming, don't worry).

So what's so different? Well, before, we would start with three different bases, coffee, coffee light, and creme. All needed to be made in advance and all were only good for 24 hours. This is why decaf and creme light were out of the question, we didn't have bases for either of those. All of these bases also contained enough sugar to stun a yak, except the coffee light, which contained a third of the amount of sugar to stun a yak.

From the base, we would continue to the ice & the syrup. These options have not changed. Then, we would blend and serve.

Now, we put in a shot of coffee (unless it's creme base), the milk (standard is whole, but again, customize), the ice, the syrup & the dry inclusion, then we pump in the syrup that makes it a frappuccino, which is sugar and other ingredients that will keep it from separating instantly.

Magical Frappuccino Maker.

Then we blend, and we serve.

Though I admit that there are a vast multitude of great points about this new development, I am apprehensive. First off, "high quality" is never what I associated with our creme based frappuccinos, and a lot of the people who drink them would drink saloon spit and tar if it was trendy. So to add an extra 4 steps to our mystical magical frappuccino tour for them seems...unnecessary. That, and the fact that it is a lot of extra steps, so battling through a line of frappuccinos on a hot summer day is going to be even more painstakingly difficult and, really, not much fun at all to do alone. My manager is hoping to hire several more employees just to handle our frappuccino rushes. All for something that's already selling in mass quantities.

And the worst part? We can no longer make more than one frappuccino in a blender at a time. That means that when a gaggle of teens orders 3 tall double chocolatey chips, we have to make each one on its own.

But I speak too soon. I've only tried it the new way once, so it may get better with practice and with the learning of new tricks. I'll get back to you after next Sunday, when I'll be a Fully Trained Professional on the subject. In the meantime, tell all your friends that Frappuccinos actually will start tasting amazing in about two weeks, and get ready to start abusing your local baristas all summer long.

Right Now Recovery

At Starbucks, like at most other big corporate businesses in this day and age, we have ass-kissing down to an art form. At the first sign of disgruntlement on the faces of our customers, we are ready and prepared to begin Puckerfest '10, starting with full-on apologies, a drink remake, a refund and, as the Holy of all Holies, our Recovery Certificates, good for a free drink of any size and any modification at any time in the future.

The winning ticket in the Starbucks lotto

Usually these are handed out when something terrible occurs after you order, whether a normally competent barista has erred beyond reason on your drink, if your wait has been unusually long for some reason, if something outside of our control is ruining your visit, like terrible odors or line holdups, or if something that should not be in your drink has somehow made it into your drink, like strings from the rags or the cap rings from the milk jugs. We know when is reasonable to hand one out, and unless our judgment is particularly clouded at that moment, we will give you one.

That being said, if you ask us for one, you're a jerk and we're all hoping that you use it somewhere else. And give yourself a paper cut on the edges.

As goes pretty much without saying, people can be kind of dicks about it. Sometimes it's what the recipients do with the coupon, like this guy who decided to test the boundaries (though I have to admit that that would have been hilariously awesome if he was cool about it and if we weren't too busy at the time. Sir Shultz, of course, might disagree; that $13 of free coffee means a store in Iowa just got closed down.)

Other times it's what people to do try to obtain one, or anything free from us. Like, for instance:

• At the mall, about once a month, we would have a heavy set older gentleman come in and tell us this long story about how he had been to another Starbucks and ordered his drink and they screwed up something awful and he got sick from it and etc etc and we'd better make him free ones. Twice, I think, he walked away with two free Venti Caramel Frappuccinos, with two shots apiece and extra caramel and whipped cream. Every other time we told him, as politely as possible, that he could find his free drinks in hell and could get them easily if he f@#&ed himself. Just kidding. We just said no.
  
• We had a woman once who demanded free drinks because we didn't tell her at the register that we had run out of the raspberry drizzle and, because of it, her drink was completely ruined. To death. When her son insisted that he was ok with it the way it was, she said, "Well, I hope you're happy wasting my money."
  
• We had a young man once spill his beverage all over himself and his apparently expensive jumpsuit and try to tell our manager that she owed him a new outfit because our coffee ruined him. This would make sense if it had been a lid application error on behalf of the barista, but he'd gotten a bottled drink, which officially means not our fault.
  
• We had a woman file a complaint and demand a coupon because the way I put her sleeve on her coffee made her spill it. The cardboard ring. On her coffee. Make her drop it. Because of how I put it on the cup. I have spent entire nights laying awake in bed trying to figure out a way that is possible for that to happen. It tortures my soul.

And then, of course, we have people do this: