I was in Starbucks opposite the British Library this morning having my breakfast. At the place where you wait for your coffee to be served the Starbucks people had kindly left out some tiny tubs with small pieces of muffin on them for their customers to sample. They often do this kind of thing. It's promotional and I imagine they hope that once we've tried a tiny bit we will be tempted to buy a whole muffin. They lose one muffin in the process, but if they can persuade one in ten people to buy a muffin (assuming they get about thirty pieces out of the original muffin) they will sell three muffins that they would not have sold. As they charge about two pounds a muffin and each muffin costs about four pence to make (and they are probably just divvying up a muffin that one of them accidentally dropped on the floor and is thus unsellable anyway) such a return will make even more money for Ian Starbuck, the man who came up with the idea of selling coffee as a drink, rather than an enema which is all it was previously used for.
Either that or the tiny portions of muffin are actually left out for the elves that clean the shop at night and then people mistakenly steal them.
So anyway, they look like they're being generous by giving you free muffin, but they're not. It's a cunning marketing plan aimed at whetting the appetite of greedy people for whom a crumb of muffin will never be enough.
Which is why whenever Starbucks have such an offer I try to eat as many of the portions of muffin as I reasonably can. No-one is going to complain if you eat two or three of the pieces, but what would happen if you stood there helping yourself to piece after piece? Would anyone stop you? There's nothing to say that the complimentary muffin intake is limited and the muffin is free, so what would they do if you just carried on eating til all the bits were gone?
Even at the age of 37 I still have a small degree of shame and thus am not so brazen as to hold the barrista's eye as I scoff the entire muffin, so I tend to try and do this surreptitiously. In my heart I would love to make off with all the bits, take them back to my seat and then reassemble the muffin like a sticky 3D jigsaw puzzle and eat it with my coffee, but instead I just wait til I think none of the staff or other customers are really looking and then grab another little tray (preferrably one with one of the bigger bits of muffin on) and quickly scoff its contents before anyone really notices. People will turn a blind eye for the first few bits, but I think there would come a point where even customers would become indignant. Everyone accepts that you can nick a bit, but there is some kind of instinctive in built morality concerning the taking of too much muffin. When we were on the savannahs of Africa there must have been some kind of animal that looked like a muffin and which was very easy to catch and so some kind of inbuilt moral code must have been created to prevent any one monkey man eating too much of it. The tuts and annoyed stares of its tribe would be enough to make him stop.
Anyway I only got up to three of the bigger pieces today, when I saw the man waiting next to me reach into one of the tubs and pinch out a large proportion of the muffin portion, but by no means all of it, which he then stuffed into his greedy face. He left a reasonably sized piece still in the tub and yet made no attempt either to eat it, or to throw away the tub containing the half muffin that had been mauled by his dirty urine-covered fingers. He just left it on the counter.
Even a seasoned small portion of muffin and occasional ginger biscuit thief like myself was appalled by his behaviour. I was almost tempted to throw the tub away for him, but thought this flagrant criticism of his actions might result in a fight. I wondered how many pieces of muffin that I'd eaten had been picked up by disgusting men like this one. Suddenly my desire to eat as much muffin as I could was not so great.
