Nine Reasons Your Barista Hates You

• Chris Blakely/Flickr

I’ve been a barista for almost a decade and I’ve seen the best and worst customers have to offer. Caffeine can be nasty: Deprived people do crazy stuff.

Here’s a list of activities that draw the ire of the person behind the espresso machine. Print it out, keep it in your pocket, learn it and be secure in the knowledge that you haven’t made yourself an enemy you’ll see every morning.

1. “Not having your coffee yet” isn’t a good excuse for anything.

It’s early, you are tired and you haven’t had your first hit of caffeine yet. Poor child. This does not make it okay to have forgotten your money, or what drink you were supposed to get for your hungover boyfriend, or to spill an entire 12-ounce cup of coffee on the ground. If you can’t function without a cup of overpriced coffee roiling about in your belly, sequester yourself until you have had it.

2. You are not prepared.

You have been waiting in line for 10 minutes, the menu dangling above you, yet as you sloth-walk to the register you stare at me with eyes agog and mouth ajar, no knowledge whatsoever of what you might order. I’m not the only angry one: that line of customers behind you is building up a solid head of impatient steam.

3. You are still not prepared.

If you know what you want, know how much it costs. Scramble around in your purse prior to the drink being handed to you. Rifling through your receipts and empty gum wrappers for a nickel tip does nothing but tighten the coil of my anger one more notch. And who knows when that thing is going to snap?

4. Money is passed from hand-to-hand.

You and I, we are both human beings. When you carelessly dump a wad of sweaty dollar bills on to the counter in front of me instead of gingerly placing them in my calloused hand, it makes me feel like a badly lit vending machine. Or a hooker. I’m not paid enough to pretend to be either.

5. You will never learn how to make latte art.

I pour between 100 and 150 latte drinks a day. The intricate muscular pattern required to pour rosettas in the top of your micro-foamed latte has been digitally encoded into my soul. How do I do it? Hours and hours of standing behind a glowing hot espresso machine pouring drinks. Can I teach you how to do it? If you can afford to quit your high-end finance job and dedicate 20 grueling hours a week to delicately dumping steamed milk into ristretto shots of espresso, then yes, yes I can. If not, next please.

6. No photographs please.

Latte art is pretty and seemingly complicated, I understand that. What I don’t understand is the customer standing on a stool, iPhone in hand, trying to get the best angle on the heart I just sliced into his cappuccino while a line of 30 people stews behind. Can’t stand the thought of never seeing that dairy-based tulip ever again? Order another drink.

7. Stop staring.

Standing behind a counter is the food industry equivalent of being in a cage. This feeling of imprisonment is not helped by you lurking two feet to the left of the register surreptitiously ogling me as I prepare your quad-shot soy latte. The continued presence of your beady eyes on my back will not speed up the delivery of your drink. Kindly step to the rear of the shop and loiter with the other caffeine addicts.

8. What did you do to that condiment table?

Okay, you’re excited. You have your coffee and you are at the condiment station shoveling sugar and cream into the murky abyss and you are just so close to having that coffee in your mouth. This does not justify you spraying cream in concentric circles or leaving a foam- and sugar-caked spoon plastered to the table.

9. This ain’t a restaurant. Bus your damn table.

I am not a waiter. I do not walk away from my shift with a bulge of $20 bills spilling from my pocket. When you are done with your delicious pastry and coffee, I am not expected to sweep in and usher your discarded dishes away. That’s what you and the bus tub are for. Leaving a pile of napkins and soiled plates on the table is the equivalent of pouring a cup of coffee on the floor and walking away. It’s a mess I have to clean up and it does not make me happy.

Sourced from sfweekly.com

18 Confessions Of A Former Starbucks Barista

Flickr / sean_oliver

1. Dealing with customers is usually a pleasant experience, but occasionally, we would get someone who thinks we are dumb as nails and treat us like we were their butlers. A woman one time literally commanded me to put in three ice cubes into her drink. Three. No more, no less. Another time, this woman asked me to make her a whey protein shake using our blenders. She handed me a packet of the whey and said, “Put this into my drink.”

2. Good managers would actually be on the floor making drinks with the staff, but bad managers would hide in the back, doing what they do, and not build team camaraderie. (We hated those kinds of managers.)

3. Starbucks uses vanilla soy milk as the milk substitute. We don’t have control over what type of milk (or any ingredients that go into a drink) will be shipped to our stores. Plenty of people have asked, “When are you getting almond milk?” as if I have control over what comes and goes in the store. (Hint: we don’t!)

4. Markouts are really nice, especially if you have a cup of coffee every morning. It basically allows us to take a bag of coffee home for free.

5. You can use markouts at other Starbucks! And if you’re really nice about it, baristas will throw in something extra, because you’re part of the Starbucks family (and know all-too-well about the stuff you deal with as a barista).

6. We had to go through the Starbucks training regime even if we had previous experience with making drinks (and it is a boring, boring process). Also, the Starbucks espresso machine is actually a pseudo-espresso machine. The machine steams the milk for you until it gets to the proper temp and all you have to do for the espresso is push a button.

7. The amount you were paid per hour depended on the location of the store. I have some friends who made $7.90 per hour to $9.25 an hour — and they were both baristas. That’s a fairly large discrepancy, if you ask me.

8. Okay, so you might say, “You guys make tips, you can make up the rest with that,” but tips, my friends, are variables. It’s based on how long you’ve worked and the tip is distributed amongst the staff at the end of the week. So theoretically, if you worked 30 hours, you might get away with $30 to $60 in tips. But that all depends on the location of the store. If you’re in a highly tourist area, you might get no tips. I have friends who got $7 in tips for the entire week. We can’t live on this. Simply put, Starbucks makes it seem like tips are this huge added bonus, but they are so variable that it would be ridiculous to work there just for that.

9. At the Starbucks I worked at, on Black Friday, we would be in the store 2 hours before the Black Friday open time to get ready for the rush.

10. Holiday rush is probably one of the most frustrating and flustering times at bar. Long lines, irritated and stressed customers, means rushed drinks and crowded stores. We’re really trying to help you relieve your stress! Stop taking it out on us!

11. The “trainings” were kind of dumb. We really didn’t learn a whole lot about coffee. It was just memorizing what kind of flavors the coffee would pair with mainly to sell the food items with the coffee.

12. Sometimes, we had to meet a quota to meet to sell in-store items and occasionally, coffee. It was always a push to sell things.

13. At bad stores, employees that came to work regularly would not get written up, leaving the ones that actually came on time to run the floor by themselves, and this really sucked during morning rush. This led to really unmotivated coworkers and widespread disgruntlement. Knowing there were no repercussions to tardiness meant people came and went as they pleased.

14. When we get really long orders, we will do them one-by-one, as to not get confused with the order. It would be really appreciated if people would stop adding to the order when we are in the middle of making drinks.

15. We were frequently told to kick out loiterers (especially the homeless). It really sucked, because you know they have no place else to go, and they’re only at the store because it’s warm. Some were really hostile to the patrons, which obviously was bad for business.

16. The Starbucks hat had to be worn at all times, even though they really didn’t do anything to prevent hair from falling into the drinks 100% of the time.

17. I can’t remember a time a barista has said, “I don’t mind when the customer just stands in front of the register wondering what drink to get, even though they’ve been in line.” Because no barista has ever said that.

18. The turnover rate at Starbucks (where I worked) was very high, considering bad management, unhappy coworkers, bad customers and low pay. Some of us just stopped going, but that didn’t stop people from applying to that store.

Sourced from thoughtcatalog.com