It didn’t hit me until I got back in my car.
I was standing at Starbucks Wednesday morning, anxiously awaiting my tall green tea latte with two Splendas. As usual, I was overly stimulated with the Starbucks retail items — the $11 giant plastic cup that has double layers so you can’t feel how hot or cold your drink is. It was on clearance. They had CDs: Alicia Keys, Paul McCartney’s latest album. And the $700 espresso machines. I think they are cheaper in other stores, but Starbucks marks them up so you don’t buy one and keep getting your morning coffee at their stores.
My drink was ready and I was on my way, but then something caught my eye as I left. It was the paperwork the store keeps near the coffee condiments. There, tucked between the pamphlets of Starbucks philanthropy, was the coffee passport.
I tingled with excitement. What was this I had stumbled innocently upon?
Could it be that I had navigated safely all these years in and out of Starbucks across the country never having donned this passport? Clearly, it was important to have one while you made your coffee purchases throughout the United States and maybe even around the world!
There had to be some kind of validation that you had a right to be in a Starbucks. How could the store possibly know if you were equipped with the proper amount of knowledge to be there if you did not have the right credentials? Or if you could speak the language required to expedite your Starbucks order and not anger the Starbucks linguists behind you?
Maybe it was only for international Starbucks travel. I carefully considered this, taking note of my good fortune that I hadn’t been asked for the coffee passport. That might have made for an awkward moment. I thought I knew all there was to know about Starbucks. For God’s sake, I had owned stock in the company. How did I miss the passport? Had I been getting away with something?
I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to be surrounded by the Starbucks consulate.
I was safe — for now. I reached out and took the passport and quickly left the building and got into my car. I placed my tall green tea latte and two Splendas in my cup-holder and opened up the passport.
There was a box indicating a place to put a portrait. I scanned my memory to see if I could recall a nearby Walgreens where I get my passport photos done. I looked again and read the fine print below the box. I don’t need an actual picture; I simply needed a sketch of my likeness.
Thank God!
I was going to need to commission an artist, obviously, but there was still time. I read on. There was what I had sought, the purpose of the passport. Following the personal information page, I read about coffee and the geography of it and then turned the pages to find different pictures of countries.
Next to them were pictures of the types and flavors of coffee that came from the countries. There were three regions, with 12 different types of coffee flavors, blends and degrees of strength. There was a page dedicated to multi-regional blends with five flavors, blends and strength levels. And then one page was dedicated to dark blends with three types and descriptions of the flavor each type offered.
That was when it hit me.
Coffee has become complicated. Coffee has evolved like the fish and the cavemen and the monkeys. Like the “Big Bang” created an entire solar system of stars and planets, coffee had grown into a universe of its own. When did that happen? Were the papers alerted to this at any point in the last 50 years? It seemed like it may have been newsworthy.
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Once upon a time, there were diners, pre-fabricated places with casual atmospheres: counter tops, late-night hours and cheap American food. There was usually a sassy waitress with the coffee pot in her hands. She would ask, “Regular or decaf?”
Those diner days are long gone. Now regular and decaf is not as simple as one pot or another. Forget about small, medium and large. Now there are ventis, grandes and talls. There are lattes, espressos, cappuccinos and Americanas. There is 1 percent, 2 percent, skim, whole, half-and-half and soy milk. There are half-cafs, decafs, and regulars.
You can make tea lattes, a hybrid mixture of steamed milk and water with a tea bag. You can ask for different types of sweetener: non-sugar, real sugar, brown sugar, stevia and honey.
Coffee is more complicated than my taxes.
Diners have evolved into reservation-seating, high-priced, retro hang-outs. They don’t offer affordable food and sassy waitresses. Like so many things in our lives, coffee has also lost its simplicity. Even coffee has lost its ability to be itself, without statuses or titles or types.
It’s no longer fashionable to order a cup of coffee without inserting a hodgepodge of adjectives to get the person behind the counter to understand what you want. Coffee has gotten so complicated that you literally need to learn a language to be able to order a cup. Gone are the days of the 10 cent cup of joe you can refill all day while you sit at the counter talking to sassy waitresses, frisky short-order cooks and quirky regulars.
The sassy waitress is now a broker on Wall Street specializing in commodities. The frisky short order cook has turned in his chef cap, white cooking apron and spatula for a three-piece suit, a briefcase and a Blackberry. The quirky regulars have become marketing executives specializing in product lines that exploit consumer impulse buying and market clever retail products, like the $11 plastic cups on clearance at Starbucks. The 10 cent cup of coffee has become the $27 per share stock price, a highly traded future and a $5 cup of commerce.
We aren’t sitting inside of a Norman Rockwell painting anymore on a stool at the counter of an owner-operated diner and chatting about the neighborhood. We are talking to PDAs instead of people.
