Plain by Default
I hate to make my first post in awhile be totally random and ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. Apparently an English professor got tossed from Starbucks for refusing to order a bagel without cream cheese. That’s right, when she refused to say “without butter or cheese” she was “forcibly ejected.”
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This just happens to be a pet peeve of mine as well. Without even going in to how ridiculous the whole Starbucks lexicon is, when ordering coffee or a bagel at any establishment the default should be additive free. That means when you order a coffee it should come without milk or sugar unless you specify and when you order a bagel it should come without cream cheese and untoasted. It really does drive me insane when I take a first sip of coffee and it’s all sweet when I asked for just coffee. I’ve also gotten in to an argument at Starbucks with a “friendly” barrista who insisted that I had to order my coffee not sweet if I wanted it that way. When I told him that was not the case at any other Starbucks I had ever been to, he insisted I was wrong.
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Maybe it’s the faux-polite Southerner in me, but wouldn’t a simple response of “No thank you” accomplish both:
1. The completion of the order
2. The desire to not say the words “butter” or “cheese”
Why hasn’t the rant tag been added to HTML 5?
I love this post and I think a lot of people have experienced similar things where the “default” is far from the expected. I am always asked at my Starbucks if I want it sweetened and that simple question solves a lot of potential problems.
However, there are some exceptions. Talk to anyone from Los Angeles about Tommy Burger. The default here is WITH CHILI. It’s pretty explicitly labeled and the chili is a huge part of what makes the place iconic. So when you get a burger at Tommy’s it will have chili unless otherwise noted and you will not be asked.
So I believe that businesses hawking uniquely iconic versions of an item should be OK not to default to plain. However, it should be noted somewhere in the process.
Starbucks does not fall into this category. Their coffee is their icon, not the sugar they put in it. Furthermore, they have been strongly pushing the correct, and unique to you drink so they should be all about options. Lastly, why would any counter server tell a customer they are wrong about their experiences at other establishments. Thats customer service 101.
In my 11 years in NYC I must have had 100+ incidents of a bodega guy slipping in sugar without me noticing. It might be in the top 5 reasons why I left. Other 4 might include:
D’Agastinos
9 Ave, btwn 39th and 47th
F train
5th Ave tourist foot traffic from thanksgiving to Xmas
I for one refuse to say venti, grande or whatever. It sounds so damn pretentious. What’s wrong with small, medium or large?
Slightly related story.
I’m upstate in a large market store. I’m making a thai green curry and have to keep asking the same, very pleasant, assistant if they have organic versions of stuff.
*holds up a pepper* Do you have this in organic?
She “Don’t think so, just conventional.”
Me, spluttering, “But….it’s not conventional. Organic food is conventional, it’s how food once was, what it is supposed to be like! The other stuff is chemically altered! ”
She, “Get lost you English doosh”
She didn’t say that, but it was in her eyes….
I was right. Since found out that Wholefoods call chemically added foods “conventional foods” too.
I want to get labeling changed so the label “Organic” is dropped in favor of foods that have been grown using chemicals/GM have a large Beeker and a Mad Scientist holding it. Big red letters read “GROWN WITH CHEMICALS”
Damn. Sorry Noah. I went off there….thanks…I feel a bit better….
Not a New Yorker, are you? In New York, “regular coffee” means with milk and sugar, always has. In lots of other countries, (including most of those in which coffee is grown), black coffee is the exception. So what “coffee” means can and should vary according to custom. It should not necessarily be “additive-free”, a pretty sterile expression for something as sensuous as coffee.
And in New York a schmear has always been standard issue for a bagel. If you don’t want one, by proper New York standards you are an anomaly and possibly wrong. Food is a cultural thing, and does not need to be governed by logic.
If you order a pastrami sandwich it will come on rye, unless you specify white, in which case you should and will be killed by villages with torches.
The “venti-tall” business is another matter. That’s a bit of corporate pretension that we could do without. But the professor should have known what a bagel should be. She fails.
Actually I am a New Yorker. Been here for 10 years and never gotten a coffee with milk and sugar when I asked for a coffee at the local bodega. As for the bagel, I agree about the cream cheese, but not the toasted. Not toasted is the default in New York as most bagels are fresh and toasting isn’t necessary.
Amplify this by a Japanese culture not willing to break rules and a shot of language chaos and the result is Starbucks in Tokyo. It’s madness!