What if they gave a Starbucks and nobody came...

For three glorious hours yesterday, I lived in a dream: every Starbucks in the country was shut down. Apparently, they needed to re-train their "baristas" on the proper use and operation of the push-button abortions they call espresso machines; so the company has admitted, in essence, that their espresso operations have become so abysmal that their people are managing to fuck up pushing buttons more often than they get it right. That doesn't surprise me at all, but I hope that the coffee laity can recognize this for the publicity stunt that it is: Starbucks closing every store for three hours to retrain their 'baristas' is like the Nazis closing every gas chamber for three hours to retrain the Sonderkommando.

I was working the night shift at Tryst yesterday, and I was expecting a bit of added customer volume owing to this event. Unfortunately, the temperature outside dropped about twenty degrees in the hour after I came on and we ended up having the slowest night I've ever seen. Good, as far as I'm concerned, because I'll say this for those Starbucks bastards: they've figured out how to create brand loyalty. If the company hadn't made brainwashing a central tenet of its business model, then I'd love to have their customers come into Tryst: I could steal thirty of them every hour based on drink quality alone, but I don't want a bunch of deluded Starbucks regulars in my shop ordering venti skinny cinnamon stick lattes and "caramel macchiatos," and getting mad when my servers try to tell them how a real macchiato is made.

I get that most people look at coffee as nothing more than a caffeine delivery system, and that's fine - a little disappointing, but fine. The world has worse problems than a widespread misunderstanding of what a real specialty coffee beverage should be. It drives me crazy, though, that a guy who barely speaks English, who can come into work stoned, who does nothing more than push buttons and pour milk for six hours a day, has the same job title that I do, just because his monolithic corporate paymaster says he's a barista. Why does he get to be a barista? Are McDonald's fry cooks allowed to call themselves chefs? My craft deserves a little bit more respect. I've worked hard to get as good as I am at what I do. I should be able to tell other educated people that I'm a barista without having to qualify it, e.g., "I'm a master barista at Tryst," or, "I'm a competition barista." I still say fuck them if they're going to look down on me because of what I do for a living - that's all well and good - but the profession deserves respect. Maybe I'll start calling myself a chef du cafe.