I was having a venti banana caramel frappuccino light (I felt like I was in a rubbish comedy sketch when I was ordering it) in Starbucks. I know they are evil and that their coffee is not the best, but they are the nearest coffee place to the gym and I am (ironically) too lazy to go any further.
The banana caramel thing is quite nice.
It's nice to see that Starbucks have caught up with Brick Lane (though the corporate version was not as good as the little guy version - support your local coffee shop, though Brick Lane is much too far away from my gym for me to do that).
I arrived at the same time as a gaggle of school girls who were about 13 or 14. I think it might be the case that the most jarring and unpleasant noise in the world is a group of young girls who've been drinking coffee. They screeched and laughed and shouted and screamed. Even though they were only about 10 feet away from me I couldn't make out a single word they said. I must be old. This never bothered me before.
I was pleased to notice that the staff at Starbucks are wearing T shirts which say "Summer 06". Just in case we didn't know what year or season it was. It's a useful service to anyone with memory problems. My guess here is that they are really catering for any time travellers who happen to pop in for a coffee, saving them the trouble of staggering from their smoking time machines and saying "What year is this?" They simply have to read the baristas T shirt and they will have a rough approximation of the date they have materialised on. It might be clearer if the T shirts said 2006, but Starbucks are a price conscious company and printing those extra two numbers on every shirt in every store would cost a lot of money. I think it's reasonable to assume that any time traveller worth his salt would be able to see the clues that would tell them which century they were in - there are cars in the street so it can't be 1906 and Hammersmith is not a post-Apocalyptic wasteland so it can't be 2106. From the clothes and the buildings and the proiliferation of Starbucks coffee shops it is clear that this is 2006.
It would be nice if the T-shirts gave the exact date, but again it would be costly for the company to give their staff a new T shirt every single day of the year. I would say it is generous of them to break the year down into is four seasons as they could easily have got away with a general '06 T shirt, but have in fact committed themselves to four times the number of shirts out a sense of service to our time travelling friends.
If the time traveller wants to know the exact date, then a barista can kindly suggest he purchases a copy of the Times, available in most stores. It's the least the time traveller can do, given the expense that Starbucks has gone to on his or her behalf. I think that Starbucks are gambling on the fact that enough time travellers will purchase a paper and maybe a muffin and a frappuccino to off-set the cost of the shirts. They must have done some marketing on this. I'd be surprised if they get more than one time traveller every ten years or so, but maybe if time travellers become aware that they can find out the season and year (provided their knowledge of history is good enough) for free at any Starbucks then they will actually make a concerted effort to go there. Of course so far Starbucks have only done this T shirt idea for the summer of 2006 so they will have to carry it on forever or it will only be useful for time travellers who know that they are landing in the summer of 2006, in which case the T shirts are superfluous. My guess is that after this first quarter Starbucks will tot up the additional income accrued from this time traveller promotion and realise it's not been worth it and stop with the T shirts. But this is foolish, as only by carrying it on forever will the people of the future be aware of what they're doing and thus use the service. It's a long term investment Starbucks. Don't blow this one through short-sightedness. If there's any chance of inventing a time machine and getting your staff in the past to wear dated T shirts as well then that would really help. And also setting up Starbucks in all historical periods, not just the last ten or so years. I am not trying to tell you your job.
Also could you impliment a "No more than 2 school children at any time" policy as well. I always thought newsagents did this to avoid shoplifting. But in fact I now realise it's to avoid the cacophony of the excited voices of young girls in groups of three or more.
