I’ve been intending to get into drinking specialty coffee for a while now. The price of coffee has gone up a ton in recent years, which sucks, but I told myself that when I finally escaped Starbucks I would upgrade, even if it was a bit expensive. Here’s my problem, though: I have kept dozens upon dozens of pounds of Starbucks coffee from years of working there.
It’s not like I even wanted the coffee itself that badly. Obviously it’s not very good coffee, but I resented working there so much that I needed to at least get my own minimal value out of the job. If Starbucks was going to extract my labor for value, I was at least going to extract my free pound of coffee every week.
At this point, though, the coffee backlog is just taking up space. I still work at a coffee shop, so most days I don’t make my own coffee anyway, I just have it at work. Theoretically, this adds longevity to my backup supply. But realistically, all that coffee is just sitting in bins, filling my closets and ticking forward months and years past its “best by” date. Heidi has joked that I’m like a dragon, sitting on a hoard of treasure that’s useless to me, unwilling to use or part with any of it and somehow still hungry for more.
Around this time last year, I was still utterly convinced that the “powerful sense of focus and purpose” I found with union work was worth being at a soul-sucking company like Starbucks. Honestly, I still believe there’s truth to that. But when the company unceremoniously deleted my store a mere two months after I wrote that post, losing me both the relative stability of the work and the opportunity to keep working on something I cared about, it became really hard to shake the deep-set bitterness I had already developed for being at Starbucks in the first place.
So you’d think I would have cleaned house at the first opportunity. But I didn’t. Even my wardrobe is still stuffed full of nondescript company-supplied shirts, which I can’t stomach wearing anywhere, but somehow can’t bring myself to get rid of, either. In many ways, most of which I resent, Starbucks has defined my adult working life. But if I ever identified with Starbucks itself, I certainly don’t anymore, and I feel like I should be able to enjoy things I was introduced to through Starbucks—like coffee and labor rights—on their own terms.
Incidentally, in the months since I was set free from the siren, I’ve had some of the most peaceful and joyful months of my adult life, financial turbulence notwithstanding. Internally, I feel like I am so much more than my stupid coffee job of years past, and I’ve finally been finding time for stuff like movies, card games, and DnD. Enlivening, soul-nourishing stuff. Recently I’ve even been considering that being a barista might be a little bit cool, so long as I’m not working at Starbucks specifically. Nevertheless, I sit on a hoard of beans.
I know I’ll never go back to Starbucks. It’s not up to me, actually, since it’s almost a guarantee that I’m on some sort of illegally-kept employee rehire blacklist. In other words, the Starbucks chapter of life is permanently behind me now, whether or not I’m ultimately comfortable with that. So I suppose it’s time I got rid of that coffee.
Image credit: “Cavern-Hoard Dragon” by Antonio J. Manzanedo, property of Wizards of the Coast
Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.
