i was sitting at a table in front of starbucks. i was mulling over my bewilderment from five minutes earlier, when i ordered two coffees of the day with room for cream. when he quoted the price for those cups of coffee, $2.90 - i was stunned. "i ordered two of them," i stated. "that's your total," replied the ruddy faced teen.
alright. my first point here is that i was actually going to pay three dollars for a cup of freaking coffee and not think twice about it. that scares the hell out of me. i'm wondering what this world is coming to, if i've been conditioned somehow to think coffee is 3 dollars per cup. but the thing is, it was one dollar and fifty cents per cup - and that's outrageous! coffee god juan valdez is surely frowning upon this from heaven. i think you can still get a cup of coffee at waffle house for around seventy five cents. what makes starbucks coffee so much better than the waffle house blend? with enough cream and sugar it tastes exactly the same. fresh starbucks coffee may be, but it's so overpowering you'd think they had left it sitting in the pot overnight before serving it, much like they do at the house.
the way they serve coffee is all kinds of annoying. the coffee sleeve is utterly useless. when i made that comment to a friend he replied, "it's there so your hand won't get burned." well okay, i figured as much. but if you do actually hold onto the sleeve and not the cup as well, that cup of coffee will fall out of your hand and you will buy another cup if you need it badly enough. so i'm thinking that this is all a big money-making scheme. why don't they just make the cups with twice the thickness, so you won't burn your hand? doesn't that make more sense? or maybe i'm missing a clue - maybe the coffee sleeve is a trend that i'm not aware of, because i'm out of the loop now that i'm employed full time and don't have extra hours to study the ever-changing ways of coffee. so i took the sleeve off and read what it said. it says "intended for single use only". what is that about? will it self destruct after one use? will i get coffee simplex two if i use it again with an "infected" cup? what if i don't use one at all? what happens then?
so i have decided to abstain from having coffee at starbucks. it's just too risky. with all that's on my plate right now, i can't deal with the added stress, what with the sleeve and all. sometimes i want starbucks coffee so desperately i cry out in fierce agony, but i want to be able to hold my sleeveless cup of coffee free of worry. and i am not ashamed to admit that i can't do that without feeling afraid at starbucks. plainly, that place is a den of lies and deceit, pain and violation. i look at it this way: if you can see yourself living the rest of your life without ever attending a particular coffee establishment, then it's probably not the one. i wonder - what would juan do?
