“I’d like a medium milk please.” Sure, that’ll be $3.50

What a plague of retardation. Starbucks is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world; they’re on every street corner, sometimes twice. Despite their immense popularity and growth and influence, they insist on using Italian names for sizes of every drink they sell, including milkshakes and tea, assuming that the average person will feel camaraderie with the brand or some such positive feeling or association. If not, then why continue the practice? Don’t want to rock the boat?

The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.

Dear Starbucks employees,

It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.

With love,
Kyle Meyer