Happy Earth Day… sort of
I went to Starbucks at lunchtime for a wee bit o’caffeine to get me through the afternoon and when I handed over my travel mug and asked for an Americano, the dude¹ said, “But it’s Earth Day. You get a free drip coffee.” My response, “But… [long pause]… I don’t like your coffee.” The long pause was because I was trying to decide if it would be too offensive to say “Your coffee tastes like you burnt the coffee beans in the seventh level of Hell for a few millennia before you brewed the coffee. I would rather eat poison than drink your coffee.” And so I got, and paid for, an Americano in my travel mug.
Anyway. If you like the taste of burning, go to Starbucks with a travel mug today and you’ll (probably) get a free coffee. A free coffee that you’ll sweeten with tiny packets of sugar or sweetener (since they don’t have a bowl of sugar) and then stir with a disposable wooden stir stick (since they don’t have reusable spoons for stirring) throwing out the packets and stir stick into a plastic garbage bag.
Also, for every Starbucks card you buy today, they’ll donate 5 cents to some eco-charity. Every plastic Starbucks card.
I mean, I’m totally down with raising awareness and having people use travel mugs and such, but I think, for the most part, “green” and “earth” are just marketing buzz words to many people.
¹I can’t bear to call them “baristas.” I’ve only just recently been able to order by saying “tall/grande/venti” instead of the proper words: “small/medium/large.”
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When I heard the promo, I didn’t think that it was only for their drip coffee. I will never understand why people drink that. Now if it had been for latte’s, I would be all in.
That is quite unbelievable about the gift card thing, especially because they tend not to get re-used like they should. I think Starbucks particularly is all about buzzwords and empty marketing. Like I really believe they are helping farmers in South America. Please.
As for tall/grande/venti, I gave in early because they did that stupid Orwellian mindcontrol thing that McDonald’s (yet another truly socially conscious corporation) does: if you actually say the proper words, they have their trained monkeys pretend not to know what you’re talking about. So if you say, “medium,” they’ll have them respond, “Oh you mean grande?” like you’re some kind of child-like moron. With Mickey Ds, if you say “pancakes,” they’ll respond, “Oh you mean hotcakes?”
It is really quite insidious and the worst kind of evil to try to colonise people’s minds like that. But then, what do we expect from transnational megacorps? Oh right: free burnt coffee and 5¢ donations for making use of plastic gift cards which encourage more consumption at their non-environmentally friendly premises.
I also got my free drip coffee.