Tell Rehab I'm on my Way
While I suck down my gargantuan morning ration of the blessed juice of the Sacred Bean, I am reading a Drudge-linked story about how Starbucks is now officially everywhere. And of course, I have questions.
First of all, like my father, I cannot comprehend the success of a company that makes coffee for ten cents a cup and sells it for three dollars, when everyone else charges seventy-five cents. I would like someone to explain that to me. Is it special coffee? Is it better (i.e. more highly caffeinated) coffee? No. So where are the three bucks going? Not atmosphere, surely. A few crappy pine planks on the walls and some tables worthy of Ikea? It's like eating in a converted sauna.
The coffee is just like everyone else's, and the atmosphere is like the lobby of a Doubletree Inn. In fact, if I lived between a Starbucks and a Doubletree Inn, I'd go to the inn for coffee. Because it's free, and they probably also have those doughnuts and rolls that come in big cardboard boxes after being baked in outsourced facilities in Indonesia.
I can just see the manager now, squinting at me from behind the front desk, on my 253rd consecutive morning in his lobby. "You SURE you got a room here?" At that point, I'd fake a fall on the linoleum and claim I couldn't feel anything in my toes and one side of my ass. After that, free Indonesian doughnuts for life.
Maybe the cute cups are what made Starbucks. Normal disposable coffee cups are naked. Starbucks puts them in those clever little sleeves that don't quite keep them cool enough to avoid burning you. Okay, so ten cents for the coffee, a third of a cent for the sleeve...that leaves two dollars, eighty-nine and two-thirds cents to account for. Doesn't it? Math is one of those things you don't really want to mess with before you have your coffee.
Here's another angle. Hear me out. Starbucks has never burned an old lady's crotch to the point where she needed skin grafts and then refused to pay her for her troubles. McDonald's did that. They should have foreseen that an old lady in a moving car would take the lid off a cup of boiling coffee and attempt to balance it between her thighs. It's like when Radio Shack sells you a soldering iron without a special guard to keep you from using your ear as a holder. The natural thing, when soldering, is to put the iron in your ear during down time.
Anyway, the greedy bastards at McDonald's made the insane claim that people shouldn't hold open containers of boiling liquids between their legs in moving cars. That had to cost them some drive-thru coffee business. And Starbucks was right there, poised to soak it up with cups of the same product for four times the price.
Maybe I can do the same thing. Sooner or later, some moron is going to be gravely injured by a McDonald's hamburger, and I'll rush in and open a joint across the street and sell burgers for nine dollars, in little sleeves that don't quite keep the grease off you. I don't know how you'd get a burger hot enough to burn someone. Getting them to hold it between their legs is the easy part.
Maybe I need someone on the inside, working the griddle and arming the burgers with little inconspicuous strips of razor wire.
Here is the other thing I don't understand about Starbucks. Where is the apostrophe? Isn't it really "Starbuck's"? "Starbuck" is a name. "Starbucks" isn't. There has never been person named "Floyd Starbucks." That makes me mad every time I see the sign. If anything, caffeine should make your punctuation BETTER.
Starbucks has Wi-Fi. Whoo hoo. I went in and thought I was all set for a fine morning of downloading midget porn, and then they told me I had to pay a fee. A monthly fee. Like 14 bucks I think. Look, I'm already paying the midget websites ten to twenty bucks a month, each. Between that and the three dollars for the sleeved coffee, I'm all tapped out. Besides, the nearest Doubletree Inn has a wireless network in the office, and I'll bet the clever password is "eertelbuod."
"Hell yes, I have a room. Check under Eertelbuod. Plaxico Eertelbuod, from Earwig, Minnesota. WHOOPS! OW! OW! MY TOES! MY ASS!"
We had a Starbucks when I was in law school. Or at least I thought we did. Out in the courtyard, they had a cart where they sold expensive coffee with a green and white logo. Every morning before class, I bought a French Roast Big Gulp. Staying awake in law school is impossible without medication. Months passed before the fateful day when I came down the stairs after class, relatively alert after consuming about two grams of caffeine, and realized it wasn't a Starbucks cart at all. It was a knockoff. Probably with a stupid name like GREAT AMERICAN COFFEE COMPANY. Or GREAT AMERICAN UNSUCCESSFUL S-CORPORATION WITH A LOGO I MADE USING PHOTOSHOP.
I continued drinking it anyway. Even after the cart went out of business and they moved to a tiny area inside the school's on-campus Subway. They could have labeled it "GREAT AMERICAN LUKEWARM RAW SEWAGE WITH ADDED CAFFEINE" and I would still have drunk it. A caffeine addict is like a cokehead who wanders around the morning after a party, licking all the mirrors. You don't question the source. You say your beans were picked by children pressed into slave labor? Fine, that only makes the coffee more precious. Don't let their suffering go to waste. Get wired and savor it, or those little bodies in that ditch in Ethiopia will have died for nothing.
Eventually we are going to reach a stage where no matter where you are, you are technically inside a Starbucks franchise. Like, you'll be sitting on the can on a Sunday morning, and you'll look to your right, and there on the shower curtain will be that old familiar logo. You'll get in your car, and a little screen on the dash will flicker to life, inform you that the car's factory-installed Rancilio is making you a double espresso, and demand three dollars before allowing you to start the engine. Then you'll go to work and do your job in a green chair that smells like spilled cappuccino, and when you die, on the bedside monitor, under the little display showing your blood pressure and heartbeat, there will be a little message that says, "Touch the screen to order a macchiato for your guests." And your urine bag will be full almost all the time.
One day you'll have a wall-sized video screen in your house, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and every morning it will come on and demand to know why you're not drinking coffee. Then instead of the villain Goldstein, it will show a picture of Mrs. Olson from the old Folger's commercials and tell you what a mean old bitch she is.
If you sneak off and don't have coffee for a couple of hours, the cops will collect you and put you in a special room, and they'll put a cage on your head full of genetically altered green and white rats. Not drinking Starbucks is doubleplusungood, my friend. If you're not wired, you're an Enemy of the Revolution.
Soon you'll see things the right way, and you'll find yourself out in the middle of the street with a bunch of people in business clothes, dancing behind an ambiguously gay guy and singing about how caffeine is going to make you successful in spite of your obvious crippling shortcomings.
That's where I see myself in six months.
Please don't tell them I made my own coffee today. I have a thing about rats.
