The Day I Quit Coffee Shops, Yet Again
Today's been cold and rainy. I enjoy this sort of weather, but it's making me terribly drowsy. I've been napping on and off for the last couple of hours. I'm overdue for some caffeine.
I went out for a coffee earlier but got stuck in line behind a woman who took five minutes to pick out a pastry. That doesn't sound like a long time, I know, but set a timer for five minutes and imagine someone poring over a selection of five or six different varieties of pastries, as they try to decide whether a chocolate croissant would be better this morning, or maybe a peach Danish, or a scone could be the way to go, but she doesn't like them too dry.
"Are the scones dry?" she asks. "I don't like them too dry."
Has that timer chimed yet? No? Wait for it. Five minutes isn't so long. You can do it.
"PING!"
The woman ahead of me finally settles on something with almonds. She pays the barista stationed at the register, and only then does the second barista, there are two, this one manning the espresso machine, start on her latte, while the registerista wanders off to the back of the house to grab that almond pastry.
It doesn't take long to make a latte, so the barista at the espresso machine soon places the woman's drink at the pick-up bar and goes back to killing time wiping down the machine and daydreaming aggressively.
It's an open kitchen, so we, the peoples of the queue, can all watch the registerista chatting with another employee, constructing breakfast sandwiches for I don't even know whom, because the place is practically empty, and none of us in line have received so much as a "Hello, I'll be right with you," let alone a chance to order an egg sandwich with bacon, hold the cheese, but she's back there working the panini press like it's the brunch rush to end all brunch rushes.
Another five minutes of conversation passes in the kitchen, and at this point I'm pretty annoyed with myself for wasting ten minutes on this life-experience, so I step out of line and wander off down the street never to return to this particular establishment.
It's not as though I'm angry about the poor customer service, per se. Terrible attitudes toward about everything seem ingrained in our culture at this point. No, it's the tipping that tips it for me. They sell me a 16 ounce cup of drip coffee for $3.25 (plus tax). Then I'm throwing in another $1.50 or $2.00 tip to subsidize the payroll because I recognize people need to eat and coffee shops seldom pay well. It doesn't matter if the service is bad or the coffee is bitter and burnt; I'm paying $5.00 for a cup of brown slop. I'm not not tipping, so coffee costs $5.00.
In return, I'm expected to be happy for the privilege of standing around with my thumb up my butt until someone can be bothered to talk to me, as though I were about to receive a Lycurgus cup full of ambrosia worthy of the Olympians themselves, rather than the sour bean extract that was sitting in a commercial thermos for the last two hours until being pumped into into a paper cup with ill-fitting plastic sippy lid. Meanwhile, directly across the street, there is a second coffee shop boasting equally mediocre brew and bad customer service. The baristas can literally wave to one another from their respective iPad cash registers while they ignore customers.
I don't know what's with Americans and coffee. Why do we do this to ourselves? Tea is far superior — especially if you know what you're doing. There should be tea houses everywhere. I would wait in line for good tea. I'll make some tea.