Coffee at Starbucks

[sholio]

This question brought to you by the peppermint mocha I am currently sipping, obtained from the Starbucks drive-thru during today's burst of ill-advised last-minute holiday shopping. I know, I know. Go me with the terrible life planning skills. Anyway, I was thinking about something.

There is a persistent joke in the media in which people, usually old people, go into a Starbucks and try to order a coffee, the baristas don't know what "a coffee" means, the old people are baffled by the menu options and end up walking out with a tall skinny mochacchino or something, and the punch line is basically that you cannot get a regular cup of coffee in a Starbucks and the baristas will be baffled if you try. I just ran across a variant of this in a book I was reading a few days ago.

... Except Starbucks does have regular coffee! All coffee shops do, at least as far as I know. If you ask a barista for a coffee, they're not going to be like "I'm sorry sir, we don't have coffee, we only have lattes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" It's usually in a pump dispenser instead of a pot, but I mean ... it's coffee?? And having to specify if you want a large or small one is something you have to do if you're buying cheap gas station coffee too???

I mean, my experience isn't necessarily universal, and it's not like I habitually look around for coffee machines when I'm not usually ordering it, but it's not that rare, is it?

Does Starbucks, or indy coffee shops or local equivalent, have ordinary coffee where you live? Have you been in ones that didn't? Have you ever seen someone try to order coffee in a Starbucks and be met with confusion and condescension? Are these jokes invariably written by people who have never been in a Starbucks and are too afraid of them to actually look up the menu?

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

I have never in my life used the coffee-shop-specific names for small/medium/large drinks because I personally find them too pretentious to say. (I also go to McDonalds and ask for "a chicken burger".) I have also been understood every time. Also coffee shops here absolutely know what you mean if you ask for a white coffee or a black coffee or a coffee with milk or whatever. I imagine if you asked for "a coffee" with no qualifier they'd check whether you wanted milk or not.

[kore]

LOL, that actually happened to T when we first got here -- he ordered "coffee" and they wanted him to specify. Nobody was condescending, tho (that was also over 20 years ago now!). You can specify drip coffee, regular, room/no room for cream &c &c. They obviously have drip coffee, you just have to get the lingo -- "tall, dark roast, no room."

the punch line is basically that you cannot get a regular cup of coffee in a Starbucks

Yeah, I think it's more that Starbucks has a really specific menu and vocabulary and it can get so involved people make fun of it (Steve Martin: "I'll have a half double decaffeinated half caf with a twist of lemon"). But I've never heard anyone get that over the top IRL. Going in to Starbucks and asking for "coffee" is kind of like walking into McD's and asking for a "burger."

(It might also have something to do with how orders are processed via the cash register -- a lot of chain restaurants have very specific keys and sometimes codes you have to learn. I never worked in a Starbucks, tho, so I don't know if they do that too.)

[sholio]

RIGHT??? I don't usually order them by their coffee shop names for similar reasons - I usually just ask for them by ounce sizes since that's fairly unambiguous - but I can pretty much guarantee from having WORKED at a coffee shop back in the '90s that people are going to come in and order using a wide variety of different terminology and you can generally tell what they want, unless they don't give you enough information and then you just ask for whatever information they didn't supply.

... anyway people got regular cups of coffee from us all the time and somehow we managed not to be pretentious dicks about it.

[sholio]

Ahaha, oh that's interesting, I wonder if that is actually something that varies at least somewhat by region and if Seattle, specifically, tends to be more terminology-specific about it? It's also possible that after enough people come in asking for a black coffee when that could mean multiple things and most people aren't going to know the exact terminology that they end up just going with a standard version of what that means (if someone asks for a black coffee they get the dark roast drip or whatever), because like you said, there ARE different options and most people who order coffee at coffee shops regularly know what to ask for to get exactly what they want.

I worked in a coffee shop in the mid-90s but we didn't actually have as many options as (IIRC) you can get at most places now; it was basically just a decaf and a regular machine, and then the espresso bar.

[glorious_spoon]

I don't really buy coffee from coffee shops all that often (because I tend to drink like two pots of it every day and that'd get expensive, lol), but every place I've ever been, from Starbucks to pretentious indy spots with exposed brick and obscure art, has grasped the concept of 'coffee, black'.

I'm pretty sure all those jokes are the cultural zeitgeist of some weird panic around, IDK, hipsters and their effeminate frothy drinks.

[ratcreature]

This! I mean, I rarely buy coffee shop coffee, but the times I have, I have never used any weird names, especially wrt sizes. If there's three sizes, I find it absolutely ridiculous to call the small one anything except "small". It's just cringey and I refuse to participate in their marketing theatrics. I also have never encountered a place selling coffee that doesn't offer plain black coffee in addition to espresso, though the reverse can happen.

[kore]

Yeah, I maybe don't think it's so much Seattle -- the indie coffee shops are way more picky about roasting, not so much how you order the drink -- but Starbucks specifically, because also part of what the whole half-caf-double-frapp deal is about is branding (like in the eighties, I remember people trying to order a Whopper at McD's and....no). Plus Seattle has had HUGE waves of people moving here, who might not know the lingo, plus tourists, but at the same time Starbucks is spreading like black mould. So there's probably give-and-take both ways. -- I think it also depends on how busy the barista is, lol. If it's slow, they can probably explain how even the drip coffee has different roasts and what the cup sizes are and blah blah blee. Otherwise they might just hand over a tall dark roast no room, like you said. The indie coffee shops don't tend to be as busy, so the staff has more time to explain, plus they don't have chain-specific drink names and sizes.

One thing I learned about working in chain food stores is they are VERY regulated. They're selling a really specific thing and there are manuals to follow and everything. Improvisation is not encouraged!

[kore]

It's a very mid-nineties thing to me, I mean I think Frasier was still doing jokes about it around then.

[sophia_sol]

Honestly my biggest problem with starbucks is that their specialised vocabulary still doesn't always get me what I want even when I use it!

My usual order (on the rare occasions I visit starbucks) is one that's relatively simple and entirely using their terminology, but the baristas never understand what I'm asking for and I end up having to have an extended conversation. I guess my order is unusual enough that they don't expect it? (it's just a rooibos steamer, half-sweet!)

[recessional]

Like I think there is a HUGE knot of a lot of crap that goes into those jokes ranging from reverse-snobbery to massive weird cultural anxieties, up to and including Fancy Coffee Is Effeminate By Which We Mean Gay, but no, they never really represented a mass reality and at mooooost you might have a barista clarify if you were looking for drip coffee or just starting what was going to turn into an espresso offer. :P (Or if it's a REALLY swanky fiddly place, if it's normal drip, eritrean pourover, or whatever).

[melannen]

I have never gone into a coffee shop and ordered a coffee, and I only go into them when a) meeting people there or b) in a train station or travel plaza where there aren't better options, but my experience is that if you go into Starbucks and order one of the fancy sweet milky coffees but with no coffee, even if you use their fancy menu terms, they are confused, ask you to clarify, and eventually give it to you but charge you as if it was a coffee. If you do the same at Dunkie's, they know exactly what you want and give it to you half-price, so if in a train station with a choice of the two, I pick Dunkie's. (I haven't tried it at Tim's. And at McDonald's they will just sell you a milkshake.)

[chomiji]

My experience with Starbucks is that they tend to have a dark roast, a light roast, and a medium decaf ready to dispense in "air pots" (the pump things). The labels on the air pots usually give whatever the cute house brand is: Veranda for light roast, maybe, or Sumatra (OK, that's actually a varietal name used by many roasters) for dark.

I generally adore terminology and ways of categorizing things, so this never bothered me: "One medium-sized Sumatra, please; leave plenty of room for cream." (I like my coffee sweet and golden but still tasting strongly of coffee.)

But a couple of years ago, my shrink advised me to cut back on caffeine because of some symptoms I was having in the evenings. It was then that I discovered that few Starbucks counter staff or baristas know how to make .... a half-caff.

Before the pandemic, I generally bought my morning coffee for work at an Einstein Brothers Bagels, where they put the coffee out in jugs with taps on them; it's Caribou Coffee brand, which is actually more to my taste than Starbucks. So I can make my own half-caff. But on travel, I sometimes have to try to swing it at a Starbucks. Oy vey.

[lilacsigil]

In Australia Starbucks went bust (I think there's still a few stores in areas with a lot of international students and tourists) because we're all used to getting good quality coffee from one of the millions of small independent coffee shops we're lucky to have. And old people here do just fine ordering cappuccinos or lattes or flat whites or whatever from a wide range of coffee options!

[sheron]

small/medium/large for me 'ktnxbai.

(When they first introduced their special names I did have a back-and-forth with the barista who kept saying 'grande' and I was saying 'no, small' because I didn't want a large latte, and I know just enough french that I completely did not understand why she kept trying to upsell me in French of all things...but even since then, I just don't care to learn the weird names that try to pretend that a small is actually a large.)

And yeah, I don't normally order coffee but I have seen it on the menu.

[fiachairecht]

My forever order at the Starbucks across the street from my department building in grad school (in the UK) was a large filter coffee with two shots of mint syrup, no room for milk. I did get a nonzero number of '...do you mean a latte/are you sure you don't want a latte?' questions at the beginning, but I think that was due more to syrup - particularly mint - in filter coffees being unusual than any particular snobbery.

[genarti]

Yeah, I suspect depending on the place, you might get some amount of "do you mean X or Y? Which roast?" etc. But I strongly suspect that anyone getting a stubborn "I dunno, just a coffee" in return is likely to make some executive decisions. ("Okay, uh, a medium roast drip coffee, small size? Cool.")

This is all guesswork, though, because I'm not a coffee drinker. I do tend to refuse to say "venti" and such because it just sounds silly to me, but I've never had a coffeeshop, chain or otherwise, balk at the lack of corporate jargon in "a large black tea, English Breakfast or whatever you've got that's similar to that."

I have occasionally encountered fancy indie coffeeshops that only have coffee and no tea, which is frustrating every time, and ones that make (presumably) very good coffee but VERY mediocre tea, which ditto, but both of those are different issues.

[lannamichaels]

There's an entire riff on it in some Tom Hanks movie, I think You've Got Mail.

[anna_wing]

I drink tea, but in this region, ordering either coffee or tea, usually from a stall in the market, or a local-style coffee or tea shop, has entire separate categories and vocabularies from the English one. I believe tourist authorities in some countries offer kind explanatory leaflets...

When my friends order coffee in English at Starbucks or some other Western-style coffee-shop, it is usually "Americano", "latte", "cappuccino", "espresso", "short/long white/black". I don't know anyone who actually drinks those coffee and syrup milkshake things (a minion who studied in the US recently explained what goes into a "frappuccino"; it passed me by entirely when I was working in New YOrk twenty years ago...).

[settiai]

From my experience, it depends on how busy they are. If they're slow, then they'll ask you for specifics because, even for a "plain" coffee, there are options as to what roast and the like (and, because of the way the computer system is set up, they have to enter specifics).

If they're busy, or if they take one look at the customer and immediately make a judgement call that the person they're talking to clearly won't have any idea what they're asking, they'll just pick a random coffee option and be done with it. I found this out the hard way, when I made the mistake of actually walking into a Starbucks with my mother. (It was painful.)

[brightknightie]

FWIW, to the best of my recollection, I have never before encountered this trope, neither in media nor in real life.

But I am a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker. So perhaps I just haven't noticed?

I almost never visit a Starbucks (or Peets, or other coffee shop). They are a little intimidating to an outsider to coffee fandom. I imagine, in my ignorance, that I would request a "plain coffee," or "just coffee," if I were trying to order one from them, thinking that my order would be unusual, rather than the norm.

[gloss]

I dislike this trope/joke for the same reasons you do -- it's lazy received-wisdom that isn't actually based in experience. I've seen people ordering at Starbucks be weirdly defensive -- "I don't know all your jargon! I just want a coffee!!" -- and the baristas are almost always pretty chill with them. (eta that kind of reverse snobbery or whatever it is exasperates me so much, but then again I grew up with an obnoxious ass of a father who'd always order tea at restaurants as "real regular workingman's tea, none of your fruity shit". :/)

The only effect I've seen in terms of Starbucks and coffee orders is that a few indie espresso places now triple-check that you *really* do want a macchiato when you order one, because what Starbucks serves as a macchiato is kind of the opposite of what it actually is.

eta 2 lol as to your actual question! Yes, the Starbucks around here (Toronto) definitely have brewed coffee.

[szzzt]

I've worked as a barista in various situations, one of which was a Seattle's Best satellite counter in my college student union hangout (BEST workstudy job) and I can tell you that Starbucks owns and sells several blends of drip coffee beans, so they'll always have drip coffee on hand. In fact I think Starbucks owns Seattle's Best now, and those drip blends were pretty good. (Starbucks' own drip blends are way too dark and over-roasted for me.)

When I worked in tinier espresso cart situations -- including one in a gift shop in Denali AK -- where we didn't have room for airpots or a method of making drip, I'd make Americanos for the folks wanting regular coffee. Not ideal because espresso machine hot water comes out way too hot for those drinks to be drinkable right away, but you do what you can when that's the only water source.

I live in Seattle now and there are plenty of Starbucks, but also plenty of other options. I think the indie coffeeshops are less likely to have arcane vocab than Starbucks because they aren't branding their drinks or drink sizes. (I make an exception for my favorite local place, which absolutely comes up with weird drinks having weird names, all of which are extraordinarily delicious.)

[alchemise]

When I worked for Starbucks (*mumble* odd years ago), regular brewed coffee was their biggest money maker in terms of profit vs cost. It was something like 1000:1.

[kore]

because of the way the computer system is set up, they have to enter specifics

Yeah, that's what I would bet money on, because of how modern cash registers are often set up.

Oh no, did your mom get stuck with something she didn't want?

[kore]

A lot of people I know who would otherwise automatically go for a giant cup of drip coffee wind up ordering Americanos with multiple shots -- sometimes five or six! -- which is not QUITE the same thing, yeek.