Communicator, cooker, drinker, poet. Grew up in a mining town, wore a hard hat.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

there is no succedaneum for caring: starbucks, this rant's for you

i have not seen akeelah and the bee. i do not intend to. i'm sure it is on par with similarly funded hollywood adventures in profit, but i am livid beyond words (bad pun, i know) about their ad campaign and am putting my foot down. starbucks, for the past umpteen years, has spent every drop of its corporate blood and sweat making the purchase of a caffeinated drink an excruciatingly efficient experience. i once left the place without my coffee because the store cast me out before it was ready. without even the slightest pretence of regard for the literacy of its customers, starbucks is unapologetically printing big words on sleeves without providing their corresponding definitions. i stared at my succedaneum grande dark roast today for twenty minutes before getting over myself and looking the damn word up. i returned to starbucks later this afternoon in order to purchase the cheapest thing on the board and complain about the absence of a corresponding definition to my sleeve word. the feeble drudge who was unfortunately faced with my question responded, embarassed, that there were a series of cards somewhere in the neighbourhood of the cream and sugar that i was welcome to sort through. i don't fucking get it. sorting through the cards isn't inclining me to upsize, add-on or engage any other such profit-affecting activity. it's just pissing me off and making me to crowd the store. causing me and hundreds of other starbucks customers to miss a perfectly good opportunity for self-improvement. who's got time to sort through a disorganized heap of identically sized and coloured word cards, especially with an overpriced coffee getting colder by the minute? prentend you care, starbucks. that's all i'm asking. pretend you care about literacy. just print the damn definition, assholes. until then, i'm boycotting. and so are all of my eager-to-spend friends. right, guys?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK that's just hilarious...but seriously i hear the movie is great...wanna go...i promise we'll go somewhere else for coffee other than starbucks...hahaha