Starbucks Memories

A hot, smooth, Grande Latte - easy foam, please.  With full-fat milk to give it heft and authenticity, none of that non-fat or non-milk soy stuff, ok ?  And make it hot, almost enough to melt the plastic lid and that will be about right. Thank you.

Out to the car, start the engine, turn on the radio to 94.7 (easy listening, soft jazz to sooth the soul), and sip tentatively, memories of scalded lip and scorched tongue enforcing caution.

Ah, this must be what the first sip from a $100 bottle of champagne feels like, or an equally fine brandy. Definitely similar to a tall cold one on a hot mid-summer yard work day.  Heaven.

Such a hot latte from the nearest Starbucks (there was one nearer every year) was my best tool (jazz aside) for lightening dreary commutes from, oh, say, 1997 through 2004.  Coffee was as essential as gas and Starbucks was my particular grade of fuel.

Roll back a few years to 1992, or even 1995, and I would have scoffed (ha!) at the suggestion of paying 3 bucks (and up) for coffee - a thing you could make for yourself for pennies, or buy in it's common non-espresso form for not much more than a dollar from donut shops, fast food outlets, traditional coffee shops, and convenience stores everywhere.  Not to mention the free stuff from the office coffee pot - a travel mug and you were (on your way) home free.  

But, like every addiction, it all started with a first sampling.  Actually not the first, perhaps not even the twenty-first, since my innate cheapness fought hard against the urge, but certainly by the fifty-first I was hooked.  

A pick-me-up for the drive after long days or late nights at the office turned into a ritual, and then a habit ingrained by ritual.  When traveling on rare occasions sans latte, I would feel compelled to take every off-ramp where, through experience, I knew a Starbucks lay waiting.  More often than not, I gave in to the compulsion.

By the time I left the job which had me commuting 100 miles a day, I was up to three lattes every work day, and two a day on most weekends.  I never thought of cost at the time, but it must have averaged about $200 a month at the peak. 

An attempt at the consulting life (sort of a semi-retirement), saw me driving less and worrying more about money, and the frugally Scottish piece of my American motley ancestry gradually dulled and then defeated my addiction.  

Eventually, a Starbucks latte resumed a more natural place in my world, as a pick-me-up, or adjunct to good conversation, instead of a furtively-sipped drug used to simultaneously numb and sharpen a frazzled and glazed commuter.

Sad then to hear, now that I've beaten my Starbucks monkey from 500 lb gorilla down to rhesus-size, that the coffee company is facing crisis.  Earnings down 69%, open stores closing and fewer new stores opening.   

And layoffs. Layoffs? Layoffs!  From the one fast-food-type service employer most people were proud to admit they worked for? 

Shocking ...

Enough to make one choke on one's frappuccino.