Some months ago, I saw a TikTok featuring the statement: “If you understood someone well enough to correct them, you understood them well enough not to.” It’s been on my mind a lot since then, and I think the principle here applies to a lot of circumstances, but for now I want to focus on one in particular.

I’m currently employed at Starbucks, and one of the several tasks I’m required to perform in the store is to take people’s in-person orders, which sounds pretty straightforward. But, well, there’s no such thing as unskilled labor.

It takes some practice to keep up with pressing the necessary buttons as fast as people can rattle off something like “Venti iced caramel macchiato almond milk five shots two pumps chai light ice vanilla sweet cream cold foam extra caramel drizzle upside down” or some such similar absurdity. And there’s a certain inevitability to dealing with rude customers at jobs like this, so some degree of emotional resilience is a necessity as well.

But another skill that isn’t typically covered in the training at Starbucks is the ability to interpret peoples’ orders the way they intend them, regardless of what they actually say. Pretty often, people order things slightly incorrectly, but they say something very close to what they mean—close enough that you can probably understand them without issue, so long as you know the menu and you know the common mix-ups.

Here are some of the classic mistakes that I’ve picked up in my few months at Starbucks:

  • “Brown Sugar Oatmeal something something.” This one is usually supposed to be a Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso, but given that it’s such a mouthful I can totally understand that it doesn’t really stick until you’ve ordered it a few times. We do also sell oatmeal, though, and it does come with brown sugar, so it doesn’t hurt to clarify. 
  • “Pike’s Peak coffee.” One of our classic blends is called Pike Place, which is actually totally unrelated to Pike’s Peak, but if you say “Pike,” there’s already nothing else on the menu that you could even mean, so this is never really an issue.
  • “Iced Green Tea.” When people say this, they might actually want an iced green tea, but they also could mean an Iced Green Tea Latte, which is actually an iced matcha latte. It prints out on the sticker as ‘Iced Grt Lat,’ though, so this is basically just an oversight on Starbucks’ part for making the names so similar. 
  • “Bacon Egg and Cheese Breakfast Sandwich.” I’m pretty sure this one is McDonald’s’ fault, but the only issue here is that we have two sandwiches that can be described like this: the Bacon, Gouda, and Egg and the Double-Smoked Bacon and Egg. It’s easy to ask for clarification, though.
  • Finally, the elephant in the room. The sizes. Some parts of the internet would have you believe that ordering a drink at Starbucks in small, medium, or large sizes will get you a sort of smug, feigned confusion and a faceful of scorn from the barista. But the truth is that if you say something other than Short, Tall, Grande, Venti, or Trenta…it’s completely fine, and I’ll get you the size you mean. You can say small, medium, or large, or you can even say how many ounces you want, and it doesn’t make a difference to me or any of my coworkers, so long as you get the size you wanted.

People get things slightly wrong a lot, and, for me at least, the impulse to correct people can be a strong one. But in the last few months I’ve already gotten better, at least in the context of Starbucks, at knowing when it makes more sense just to continue on, knowing what they meant and operating as such. I’d like to think that this is a skill that makes me a more pleasant person to be around.

1 Comment

  1. Juliana Knot

    It’s a small act that goes a long way. Cheers to you Phil!

    Reply

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