"Sticking it" at Starbucks

I've wondered this for a while, whenever I'm at the Starbucks sweetener/cream/napkin counter: how do you choose a stirstick? You know, the slim pieces of unknown-variety wood all stacked together, end-up, in a metal container? Do you rifle through them? Choose one that's already "standing" up? Pick an outside edge hoping no one else has touched there?

And if you fumble and touch two or three, do you leave them there with your fingerprints on them?

I'm more inclined to take the one reaching for me, that's been lifted out of place by the disturbance of its fellow sticks.

You?

The birthday goodies continue

And from Soft Surroundings, a favorite clothing site for me: $20 off a $75 purchase, good in the store or the outlet. Of course, what I've an eye on is under $70, so I'll have to scout around for a little something extra. Clever folks. Coupon expires Aug. 31.

An email from Starbucks saying there's a coupon coming for any drink/size I want. Don't know the expiration since the coupon hasn't shown up, but it's usually into the next month. That one is as good as cashed.

And from Chamberlains, a half price entree with the purchase of entree. Alas, it expires on my birthday and I don't think I'll have time to cash it.

Pick a stick

As I stood at Starbucks the other day, I contemplated the stirrer holder before I picked one out to mix my cream and sweetener into my coffee.

(Aside: At home I mix from the bottom up like my dad taught me: cream and sugar in first, then coffee. It gives it a much better flavor. Or maybe I'm just used to it.)

Still, looking at the stirrer collection, I wondered how other customers picked one out. Granted, you'll use the end that's still in the container, but do you touch them all before making your choice?

I tend to pick one that's by itself, or slightly disturbed, sticking up a bit.

Just wondering.

Too valuable to use

While I have long subscribed to the philosophy that if I have it, I should use it, there are some things which become too precious to use. A case in point would be the first Christmas tablecloth which I began having our dinner guests sign. My mother was among the first, then my dad. Friends of ours who've long-since moved, friends of our sons. To use it isn't a worry; to wash it and slowly erode the "permanent" ink is. So it is in my hope chest.

Now, I have another item which I'm about to retire, my Australian Starbucks mug. There's a slight crack around the rim and yesterday I kept hearing popping sounds from it as my coffee cooled. I think this portends an ultimate, sooner rather than later, mug collapse. I have used this mug since it traveled home with us from Sydney in Feb 2005. For five years, it has been my faithful morning companion and no one else has sipped from it. (They wouldn't dare.) Since then, I've acquired other international mugs, some of which I've brought home, others that I've "traded" for with a friend. I have Lima, Chile, San Diego, Vancouver, London, Adelaide (second trip). Dallas, even. Some are too big for morning coffee and are in storage.

But I'm going to have to choose a new favorite. To break my purple and white mug with the koala and Sydney Harbor Bridge on it would cause me no little sadness. It has finally become too valuable to use.

Everyone's a clown

I love Starbucks. I make no secret of it. So there we are in the San Diego Airport Southwest Airlines division and I'm at the Starbucks. Two talls with room is the order. The guy at the urn tells the one at the cash register: No charge for the room.

Now, that's clever. Hard not to smile and so I don't even try.

Let's hear it for levity in the most out of the way places. Thank you, Starbucks, San Diego Airport, Southwest division.

Did you want your receipt?

Or how about your reciept? Your receict?

Waiting at LAX for our plane on Monday, I had need of a Starbucks LA-logo'ed mug for a friend. The smaller stand next to the gate didn't have such, so I ventured to the larger one near the Southwest entrance. Sure enough, mugs. I stood in line (nothing else to do) and did the author-thing: watching and listening. Not much going on, so I started reading. On the Starbucks chalkboard was a reminder that your 'reciept' from the morning would get you a cheaper beverage in the afternoon.

Thirty minutes later, we decided that a coffee would be in order and I, once again, stood in line to retrieve such, this time at the smaller operation beside our gate. Chalkboard also declared the advantage of having a morning 'receict'.

Between the two of them, they had it spelled correctly. And I really don't have anything else to say on the matter except I'd never thought of the latter permutation.

Starbucks, traveler's checks, and me

Not that I would give a traveler's check at Starbucks, but some people obviously do, because there's a new policy in effect come Monday.

I stopped for my regular Tuesday afternoon tall cup of coffee and quickly noticed the sign over the cash register. Come the 25th, no more personal checks or traveler's checks. The former I understand. The latter? I had to ask. After all, traveler's checks, as I convinced many a clerk over our travels last summer, are as good as cash.

Not in the eyes of Starbucks. They are now being counterfeited. Well, now, isn't that a set-back for the traveling public. I guess the world really is coming to cards, credit, debit and otherwise. So I paid with my black $25-a-year, 10%-off-all-purchases Starbucks card (I think it's paid for itself by now and I'm on gravy), and left.

Starbucks' library

Each Tuesday I stop at my favorite on-the-way-out-of-town Starbucks. The store has been remodeled with comfy chairs and a few couches. It's very much a cozy place. And since every cozy place needs books, someone with a lot of foresight has provided a lending library shelf. Customers are encourage to take and return, take and replace. Just take.

This is, of course, too much for an author to resist. As soon as I spotted it, I determined to put one of my own up there. I chose A SUITE DEAL, the 2003 HOLT Medallion winner from the Virginia Romance Writers chapter of Romance Writers of America. It's a small book with a bright pink spine which I thought would attract prospective readers. I put it on the shelf, patted it for good luck, got my coffee and left.

The next week, I checked again. It was gone! Someone was reading it!

The next week, it was back. Did they return it unread? Did they enjoy it so much, they've put it there for others to enjoy also? I'll never know.

Over the weeks, the shelves have become full with all sorts of books. There's Nora Roberts and baby care. And squeezed in there is still mine.

I think I'll take another.

The Chick with the Check

I must have 'take all the time in the world, I have nothing else to do' tattooed on my forehead. I know it's not on my back because the people who can read it are always in line ahead of me.

Being 45 minutes early to a photography class, and knowing there wasn't a public restroom at the store where I bought the expensive camera and therefore earned these lessons, I followed my bliss to the large grocery store around the corner from my destination. Inside was a Starbucks, and while I didn't need any more coffee, I though a pastry would help deter the growling stomach since the class wouldn't end until past my regular lunchtime.

Of course, the Starbucks had been empty when I went in and had a line once I was ready to buy. No problem. I still had 30 minutes. I picked out my pastry, much as I would stand at the butcher's counter and select the steak of choice, and waited.

And waited.

The woman in front of me, said Chick (term courtesy of my son), was probably 40. Harried, in a hurry, with a burgeoning purse and a red all-weather coat. She was taller than I was and knew exactly what she wanted. Good, I thought, then I processed the order: decaf, Americano, tall but in a venti cup, no water, but ice.

Okay. Kind of defeats the idea of a morning jolt to have decaf anything, and an Americano by definition is made with water. What she wanted was iced decaf. THEN, to add insult to what-the-heck is going on here, when handed the beverage she wanted them to fill it the rest of the way with milk. Maybe it was 2%. Or soy. I don't know because by then we were in the payment problem.

She'd left home without her debit card. She didn't have the $2.44 for the beverage. Could she write a check?

A check? What's that in big urban Dallas? I haven't seen a check pulled out of anyone's wallet in ages. Everybody debits or credits or occasionally (like me) pays cash.

They agreed to a check and she dashed it off. Into the machine it went. Out. In. Out. By this time, she was consuming whatever coffee-like atrocity she had, so there was really no giving it back. The cash register (what an anachronistic name) stopped. It wanted a driver's license. For a $2.44 check. It was even, as she pointed out, drawn on the bank whose offices were inside the grocery store.

She handed her license over. Punch, punch, punch. The check goes in and out and in and out... and something else comes up on the screen and the clerk, herself now not feeling too well, calls over her superior. There was a problem she'd not seen before.

While Two takes over that problem, One asks to get my beverage started. I point out my special pastry and she pulls it out, then asks her boss if there's any way they can ring it up. Of course not. There's only one register. By this time, they're calling the manager of the grocery store over and I'm tapping my foot. Time has nothing to do with this. I have plenty of time. After all, that's what my tattoo proclaims, right? I'm focusing all my chagrin on the woman who doesn't know what coffee is.

"I have cash," I say. "How much is it?" Two eleven they tell me. I find the exact change (whew!--I could have ended up making a donation of pennies to them--and I would have), snatch up my ill-gotten gain and go to the car. There, I unwrap my package, decide where to take the first bite, and wait for the Chick with the Check to emerge from the store.

She flies out the door and down the sidewalk about the time I realize I don't care for this particular pastry at all.

The true everlasting flower

Last Sunday was Mother's Day and it seemed that the desire to share carnations with the world's mothers was overwhelming. First of all, the local big box was handing out the long-stemmed pink flower to any woman who walked through the door. I side-stepped this intrusion on my shopping. I was not so fortunate at church, where I didn't know what to do with said flower while I sang the anthem. Upon leaving, I foisted it off on a friend to give to her grandchild who could then add it (no doubt) to her mother's collections of carnations.

Thinking I was safe, I sailed into Starbucks, only to be presented with another. We were on our way to a musical and then dinner out, so I tossed it in the back seat of the car and didn't give it another thought. Forgot about it actually, until Tuesday morning when I opened the rear door and found my carnation. It had been without water for 36+ hours and looked quite well for the experience. Guiltily, I took it into the house and put it in a bud vase where it now dominates the kitchen counter. It looks forlorn and a bit lonely and I hope that's a touch a brown I'm seeing so I can toss it guilt-free.

Carnations not my favorite flower, you say? Probably not. Their very ubiquity and stubborn refusal to crater when a saner flower would do so, rub me the wrong way.

And then there's the carnation which refused to die.

When I was growing up, and probably until about 15 years ago here, on Mother's Day Sunday everyone wore a flower. If your mother was alive, you wore a red one, if dead, a white one. Absent supplying it yourself, there was always someone at church handing out the appropriate hue. My mother had red roses and made sure we were outfitted correctly. However, my dad's mother had died many years beforehand and Mother had no white ones.

Enter the white carnation. Kept in a plastic see-through box in our refrigerator, this boutonniere lasted from year to year. To year. I don't remember the refrigerator being without it, nor do I know what eventually became of it. But each year, Mother pinned it to Daddy and that was that.

I grow white roses in my garden and red ones. If the tradition were still alive, I'd pin a white one on myself and a red one on my husband. By the end of the service, they would look haggard and tired and be discarded, as they should be, not sagging in my kitchen because I can't throw it away just yet.

Day 3: M2M: A Tire-ing experience

Fifteen things to do in a Springfield IL Starbucks for 2 hours while waiting for new front tires:

1. Dry and curl hair
2. Split coffee cake
3. Tell everyone else's funny (to you) honeymoon stories. Wonder that some of these didn't doom marriage from start.
4. Watch grandparents and 3 kids at next table. Wonder if this is your future.
5. Tell your dad's war stories. Wonder that he survived.
6. Walk to Walgreen's.
7. On to Super K-Mart.
8. Lament that there are no antique malls within walking distance when you could go guilt-free. (Not that guilt will stop me.)
9. Solve the problem of cup holders on the dining table by buying a shower caddy.
10. Get a USA Today at McDonald's.
11. Back to Starbucks.
12. Buy water. What do they think this is--coffee?
13. Read the paper.
14. Read the book you (thankfully) brought with you.
15. Stand in front of McDonald's and be picked up by two guys in a rented RV.

On to the middle of Wisconsin to a family-owned RV park amid the pine trees. WiFi in the lobby. Spouse cooking chicken on the griddle. Travel companions doing laundry.

I sense an early night.

Spotted eight more state licenses and 2 Canadian provinces.

And... it's hot.

McDonalds, Starbucks and me, Part Two

I won't make you scan to the end of this post in order to learn the bottom line: Starbucks has nothing to fear in losing me as a customer, but, on the other hand, if McDonalds is my closest option for coffee, I won't pout about going.

After lunch today I was in the neighborhood of a large, very busy, McDonalds. The drive-through line being daunting (they had a clerk standing on the sidewalk taking orders so either the may-I-help-you box was broken, or this is more efficient), I parked and went into a virtually empty store. It was 12: 20. I ordered a small coffee, which for some reason was 89 cents instead of the advertised 99, was offered cream or sugar (took the cream, supplied my own artificial), paid, and waited. The manager (assistant or shift leader, perhaps?) poured my coffee from a carafe 1/3 full. He looked at it, looked at me, dumped it and the rest of the pot, and poured me a cup from a carafe nearly full and in the to-go window.

I was impressed. I swear I wasn't wearing my "I Love Starbucks" tee shirt. (Do they even have those? More importantly, can I get one?) But back to the day's adventure.

I doctored it to specs and was pleasantly surprised (as I had been previously) to find it quite good. Leaving it in the car while I stopped at a grocery didn't turn it bitter.

Now at this point, I had already considered making my usual stop at Starbucks for an iced coffee. Instead, I poured this over leftover ice and drove on.

Was it as satisfying as Starbucks? No. My customer loyalty is firm.

But that new McD's chicken wrap did look interesting...

Starbucks, McDonald's and me

When Consumer Reports stated that McDonald's coffee was actually better than Starbucks, I was, well, verklempt. I'm passionate about my coffee, and in an atypical stance, I'm brand loyal. And that brand is Starbucks.

I wasn't always a coffee aficionado. I shied away from coffee until I was 25. Truth to tell, I don't know how I stayed awake in all those 8 o'clock morning college classes. Oh--now I remember--fear of failure. That aside, I didn't start my affair with coffee until my husband's grandmother laced a strong cup with sugar and cream and sent us on our way when we moved from Texas to Georgia. Coffee (and talking to the truckers on the CB--"you got your Lone Star, here, come back!") kept me awake as I drove one vehicle and husband the other. I fiddled with coffee for the next several years, knowing for sure I was enceinte when I couldn't stand the stuff, dying for a cup the morning after delivery. (I had a similar experience with bacon.)

Over the years, I developed a real love of coffee, the strong stuff, and when Starbucks first offered its Encore program of mail-order goodies, I signed on for 3 pounds every other month. There wasn't a Starbucks within 60 miles of me at the time, but as the brand has spread like a weed and came within 25 miles, the program was discontinued. I think it's back in full swing, but I manage to buy and have ground to my specs, what I need now.

Being picky about one's coffee means taking it with you to morning meetings, emptying the pot into a (Starbucks) to-go mug and sipping what you like while everyone else has the house's. I don't do this everywhere I go; I know who serves the good mugs.

So having Consumer Reports say McDonald's is better was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. We have a local McDonald's. If it was really better, than it would be really better here, too.

I timed my trip to coincide with my after-lunch cup. This is when I usually visit a Starbucks, so I thought that a fair comparison. My caffeine level would be the same for either. McDonald's does not have Sweet'n'low sweetener, so I provided my own. I usually treat myself to a dollop of half and half, too, but I knew I'd have to forego that. I didn't go through the drive through, but walked in.

Small town McDonald's, after lunch, place just recovering from the girl's basketball team who were all munching on fries and burgers, drive through line long. I'd been wise to come in. Ordered my coffee. Cheaper than Starbucks. I like a bargain. And then she poured me the absolute bottom of the decanter. Shook out the drops.

This was not a good sign. Starbucks would have asked me to wait and they'd make more.

I took my cup, doctored it, and tried. I'll give them this: even for the bottom of the pot, it was far superior to what they used to serve.

But it wasn't my usual experience. To be fair, I pass the arches every week on my sojourn into the city. I'll stop and try another cup. I've already stocked my purse with Sweet'n'low.

But if I were McDonald's, I wouldn't be holding my breath to have me as a new customer.