Nah’msayin?
Java Jerks
__900_665_90.jpg)
Normally when you enter a coffee shop and order a medium coffee, the employee behind the counter reacts by saying “Sure” and proceeds to pour a medium amount of coffee into a medium-sized cup. However, if you walk into a Starbucks franchise with the exact same request, a slightly different scene unfolds.
The counterperson will respond by saying “Oh, you mean you’d like a grande?” while holding up the medium-sized cup, obviously understanding your request, yet refusing to serve you until you’ve conceded to Starbucks’ perverse nomenclature.
Quite frankly, this little lingo run-around is really un-fucking-necessary to anyone’s morning caffeinating process.
Firstly, these cup names don’t even make sense. The word venti is Italian for the number 20, which works for the 20 oz. hot-beverage large, but not for the 24 oz. cold-beverage large. The word grande means big, and mezzo actually means half. And in the States, a small is called a “tall.” Don’t even get me started.
Somehow, because these names are Italian, the classiness overpowers the need for logic. The only reason Italian even enters into it is a corporate branding strategy that attempts to make customers feel as though they were in an authentic Italian café instead of a franchise belonging to multi-million dollar American-owned corporation, the ubiquity of whose locations has been a punch-line for about a decade now.
At the end of the day, all these fancy cup-names have done is breed snobbery. I was at a “we-brew-Starbucks”/“not-actually-a-Starbucks” location recently when I heard a customer harassing an employee who didn’t understand what a venti was.
The man refused to ask for a large and the poor minimum-wage employee, who barely spoke English to begin with, just stood there dumbfounded like she was about to cry.
Well done, Starbucks—you’ve succeeded in exporting your brand of pretentiousness outside of the rarified atmosphere of your own cafés into other people’s. How Americano of you.
