So fun story for you fellow baristas out there.

A couple of weeks into my time at Starbucks I had a young gentleman who I can only assume was improperly medicated come in our main door and one of my favorite regulars come in the side door at the same time. My dude here sprints up to the till. I'm assuming he's just super excited to get his coffee (It's still like 5:45am if there's anything to be excited about, it's coffee). He gets up to the till and I say good morning and ask him if there's anything I can get started for him. He says he's doesn't know yet, not the strangest thing to ever happen and my regular is pretty chill so I know he's ok with waiting an extra 15 seconds for his coffee. I double-check with homeboy at the till and he still isn't ready to order, not a big deal, but at this point, I'd like to help my regular who is still patiently waiting. So I ask muchacho over here if he's willing to step back so I can help the kind gentleman behind him. Apparently, this isn't an acceptable compromise as he was at till first, so naturally, he shouldn't have to move. Sure my dude, whatever gets your dick wet. Another 20 or so seconds passes and another regular joins the line. Maybe I can just use the other till so he doesn't have to leave his oh-so-precious start. Now this is blatant proof that I'm harassing him and trying to infringe upon his freedom to order coffee in whatever manner he sees fit (probably in the constitution, don't fact check me) and my behaviour can't be tolerated, so this man starts yelling at me and the few people in the store about how terrible the service is and how I'm ruining his day by being so abusive. Turns out none of the other customers in the store at that point saw his perspective and one of the larger humans to grace our presence that day kindly suggested that he leave before he does something he regrets as he's ruining the peaceful vibes that are Starbucks before the world wakes up. This dude decides it's the best plan of action to look at me and ask "are you seriously going to let him talk to me like this? He's threatening me!". Apparently, my eyes said yes because the next thing he did was pull out his phone to call the police on me for being emotionally abusive..... nothing about the dude who actually threatened him strangely enough, for sake of my then favourite small giant I'm saying that was a good thing though. At this point, my manager was also calling the police because well, duh. Upon learning this information he goes to wait outside of the store for the police to come. I'm not sure what ended up happening, but that's the story of how I ended up getting questioned by the police for failing at taking an order at Starbucks. I was under the impression that this meat tube ended up getting banned, but apparently he didn't get the memo because a couple of weeks later he ended up coming back just to throw some garbage at me. He missed.

Next super fun one, the day that I learned customers per half is actually the worst metric ever. About a year and a half after this first story took place I'd become a Shift and transferred to a small store a couple of kilometers away. We'd just gotten a new manager. She was a fantastic woman, but she didn't know about the truck parade. Can't blame her for that, I didn't either until this happened. What is the truck parade you ask? Every year around Christmas a bunch of big trucks get all done up with Christmas light and tinsel and all that goodness to drive around the city, the route passes directly in front of my then-current store. We were scheduled for a regular two-person closing play, nothing too out of the ordinary for a Friday night. One of our regulars comes in and asks if we're ready to get slammed later. I don't think too much of it and continue with prepping for close. Oh me of little faith. About an hour later I start working bar because we're picking up a bit and my barista can't handle it alone, a bit strange given the usual level of busy on a Saturday, but nothing too odd, or so I thought. I was under the impression that after 5-10 minutes I could go back to closing our last till and going on my final break. How long was it until I stopped working bar? About two hours. Why did I stop? Was it because the rush ended? or we closed? NOOOOOPE, we'd been so busy that in the thirty seconds prior I had run out of whip, mocha, chai, espresso, and 2%. We went in fully stocked for the next 24 hours. One dude in the cafe got kinda upset and was like "why aren't you guys making my coffee?" to which I responded "because I'm out of mocha, chai, whip, espresso, and 2%, and I need at least one of those for the next 8 drinks" (I knew the next 8 because screw standards, everybody was ordering talls so I was making two drinks per bar at with another 2 per bar prepped, technically following beverage sequencing but with twice the drinks in each step and twice the bars, don't @ me, it was the fastest way to make drinks) and the dude has a small temper tantrum in our cafe because his coffee is taking so long. Keep in mind due to the limited size of our cafe once you ordered the wait was under 10 minutes during our small pause, and there were so many humans in the cafe it would take about a third of that just to squeeze your way to the other side. Anywho, my barista and I start frantically prepping all of the missing product and are back up and running in about 4 minutes. A bunch of people ended up giving us tips at the bar because they felt bad that we had to do this all alone and they didn't want to wade through all the humans to get back to the tip jar. When it finally ended I immediately locked the doors (about 15 minutes before we were scheduled to close) to regain my sanity and try to understand what just happened. We got out 45 minutes late because it was such an exhausting last three hours there was just no energy left to redo closing tasks we thought we'd already done, make backups for the third time, and generally maintain a desire to live. Apparently, when my manager got in the next morning she had to re-whisk the mocha and wipe down the bar, both of which are tasks I was under the impression we'd done, turns out we did a really bad job. The good news was I made the executive decision to split the tips handed to me at bar and we both walked home with an extra $20, not worth it at all, but better than nothing for sure. Why does this make me hate customers per half as a metric? We peaked at a 42 that day, in the morning. The most we did in the evening hell-storm was a 28. What's so bad about that you may ask? The 42 made our store just over $200. The 28 made over $500. In fact, we had back-to-back $500 halves with the whole three hours never being below $300 a half. The only other times I've seen halves get over $500 is on Christmas running a 6 person play, and at my fake home store which is a drive-through running an 8 person play (we did a 69 on one of my last days there, it made me chuckle). I'm sure a lot of you have done over $500 in a half, but how many of you did that on a two-person play? I'd assume quite a few less. That's why I started tracking dollars per labour hour (Seems the benchmark is around $80CAD/labour hour for my fellow nerds out there).

My final story is a happy one that comes from the aforementioned fake home store drive-through. I started there last September because Covid things and my store not having enough hours for me. The team there is amazing, even if just for tolerating all of my I don't work here jokes. By the end it wasn't even my district. Either way, on my last day at the store my manager brought me two cases of beer, one as a housewarming gift (I'd recently moved even further from the store), and one as a thank you for being an amazing borrowed team member. She even gave me a hug which was huge because normally she's big on Covid guidelines. Also, I'm touch-starved. With an hour and a half to go they said they wanted to change the music over the headsets and I said I wanted to listen to the final count down on repeat for my last hour and a half. They shut that idea down real quick, I didn't think much of it. With five or so minutes to go the shift says they have a surprise for me and run into the back. They continued to BLAST the final countdown over the speakers (definitely on the Starbucks-approved music list) and give me a standing ovation as I clocked out for my final time as a member of their team. Was it over the top? Most certainly, but it meant a lot. It's the closest I've ever been to crying at work. I'm so incredibly grateful to every person at that store for welcoming me as one of their own even though I struggled a bit with the identity crises of loving the store and the people but technically not working there and definitely not wanting to commit to commuting there enough to transfer. Especially one particular barista who appreciated my honesty when drive-through customers asked me for my favourite iced drink and I would respond with water. True fact, it's my favourite iced drink.