Consider the A-Hed piece by Heather Haddon with the heading: "When a Double Chocolaty Chip Crème Frappuccino Isn't Enough."
Apparently the influencers on TikTok, now the most followed social media site by today's young adult youth, dream up dozens of concoctions. Ms. Haddon tells us "The drinks treat Starbucks' menu less like a lineup of drinks and more like a buffet of ingredients to be mixed together in unorthodox ways to create off-menu drinks that may list 10 separate customizations on the side of the cup."
Needless to say, the baristas are struggling to keep up while the lines get longer because of added wait time, just because someone is reciting the Gettysburg Address when they finally reach the counter. Think of the "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" soliloquy from Pirates of Penzance and you'll know what you're up against when you're third in line.
Ms. Haddon includes a dizzying array of combinations that are getting ordered these days: "A Venti cold brew with caramel syrup and vanilla sweet cream cold foam, apple brown sugar syrup, apple in the foam and cinnamon dolce on top." (I'll assume there's coffee in there somewhere. You're on your own if you don't know what a dolce is.)
There are more. Many more. Some that even strain to let you believe there's actually coffee in there somewhere, since it's not listed as an ingredient.
I will tell you now I'm not a coffee drinker, and on a few occasions that I did wonder into a Starbucks to buy the print copies of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times it didn't go well. It's bad enough that I went in without carrying a laptop, but I wasn't buying any coffee, tea, or anything else other than the newspapers.
The person whose attention I finally got was straining to find the UPC codes to scan into the register. They were actually opening the paper. The manger, closer to half my age could sense I was about to blow a gasket when they came to the rescue and took over. I now reliably get home delivery of both papers.
As for drinking coffee, I believe that may have stopped sometime in 1967 when my last cup might have been in what was then called a "Coffee Shoppe" on 17th Street and Third Avenue. There were lots of places like this, small places with a counter and some booths that were a cross between a diner and a luncheonette.
This particular place was owned by a pair of Greek brothers-in-law, one named Dino, who was outgoing and friendly, and the other whose name I forget, who was never further than two feet from the cash register, always with a hang dog face that grew out of his always being worried about what the stock market was doing.
Coffee then might have been 25¢ and was served in a thick ceramic cup on top of an equally thick ceramic saucer. (If you remember those, my God you're old too.) I took it black and was usually on my way in the morning to City College at 137th Street, the second and last institution of higher learning that I dropped out of.
After engineering school, taking French had no appeal to me. Nor did my schedule which on certain days required me to make it from the lower part of the campus to the upper part of the campus in five minutes so I wouldn't be late for phys ed. in Goethals gym. It was impossible. A speeding presidential motorcade with lights flashing couldn't do it.
Then there was the snobby attitude of either the history or English instructor who laughed at the image of a guy in front of a TV with a beer in his hand, watching a ball game in his living room, possibly wearing a so-called "wife beater" T-shirt. It didn't fit the description of anyone in my family, but I saw nothing wrong it.
Try as I might, coffee just seemed to upset my stomach, even decaf coffee. So coffee and formalized higher education and I parted ways and I went to work at a health insurance company for 36 years. It pretty much financed my life.
I don't shake my head or belittle those who live on $8 coffees topped out with all the ingredients they can think of.
After all, like I was back then, and like they are now, they are just trying to have things their way.
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