I Speak Starbucks
Love it or hate it, it seems like you can’t go more than a couple of hundred metres in a city centre these days without tripping over a Starbucks. They’re all reassuringly the same. Green aprons (green for calm, calm, don’t hurt the baristas, for they provide coffee), beige and maroon walls, nice earthy tones. Pointless jazz on in the background, because clearly that’s what I want to listen to when I’m Being Careful of my Extremely Hot Beverage.
The sad thing is that while I know that every Starbucks in the entire world will be exactly the same (and according to Wikipedia there are 15,011 branches in 44 countries) I will still go sheep-like unto the baristas for my Chai Tea Latte when I get the craving for some cinnamon.
Which is why we all flock there of course. It’s familiar. In a country like Japan, where both the spoken and written word is so completely different to English, Starbucks becomes a little island of reassuring American calm in a cacophony of kanji.
It’s why I wasn’t surprised, on entering the Starbucks closest to Kyoto station the day before yesterday, to find the entire place packed full of tourists at 9am. Your average westerner, faced with the prospect of a Japanese breakfast of grilled salmon, miso soup and rice, washed down with some green or barley tea, stares blankly for a few minutes and then cries, “… but where’s the coffee?” Desperate for caffeine, they crawl blindly from their ryokan, navigating only by the scent of freshly-ground coffee beans.
Rice for breakfast is also a bit of a leap. Rice for lunch? No problem. Rice for dinner? Sure! Rice… Breakfast? What? Breakfast as well? But Starbucks lures us in with the siren calls of scones, the melodic music of muffins, the call of cake. Hooray for processed wheat flour!
Back to the day before yesterday, and in I crawled, a fellow craver of caffeine. But ho! There was a queue! That selfsame Starbucks had been a breeze the previous day at 5pm. The staff were highly efficient and the process, I think, took slightly less time than my average Starbucks experience (and they all had better hair). So what was going on?
I began to eavesdrop, and it didn’t take long before the reason for the delay became clear.
The people at the front of the queue did not speak Starbucks.
I will just take a moment to explain something about the Starbucks in Japan. The menus are almost identical to those you’d find in a Starbucks in the U.S. or the U.K., only everything is transliterated into the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So I can waltz in there quite happily and order my “gurandei saizu no tazo chai tee ra-te kudasai” and be 100% sure that I will end up with exactly what I want. I’m not sure how it works in other countries, but I do suspect that (as a result of shrewd marketing on the part of the Starbucks chain) they will have followed this pattern with as many of the countries they have invaded moved into as possible. What could be easier? Instant oasis of American; no struggling with the menu. The same baked goods available in every café, the same drinks (with regional and seasonal variations to add interest), all adding to that cosy Starbucks feeling of familiarity.
So it was with shock and a little awe that I realised that the people at the front of the queue were painstakingly explaining what they wanted, in English, using such no-no Starbucks words as “large” and “coffee”. In the same sentence.
“A large coffee,” he said in that slow, careful voice that people use to talk to people of a different nationality. The barista looked a little embarrassed as she got out her demonstration cups with the air of a sex education teacher in her introductory class.
“Tall, grande, venti,” she said, indicating which was which, and modelling the words for the customer much as I would for my class of eight year olds with new vocabulary.
He pointed to the venti cup, and said again, “Coffee.”
The barista looked pained, and raised her menu, which has the Japanese and English names for each of the drinks listed side by side. “Many coffee,” she tried hesitantly, in English, “Which one?”
It occurred to me then, that (at least between English speaking countries and Japan) Starbucks has become New Esperanto; a language of universal expression. An Englishwoman and a Japanese can come together and communicate without barriers in the language of Coffee. Provided both parties are down with the lingo, successful transactions can be made again and again, with satisfaction on both sides. What business language can compare to that? Sure, nothing more complex than, “Do you want that to go?” can be expressed, but what does that matter? What more does the human race need?
I pity those who do not speak Starbucks. I can walk venti because I know that a Frappuccino is cold. I need fear nothing when I can ask for a tall Iced Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte without batting an eyelid. The revolution is coming, and it’s wearing a green apron.
Have you had your caffeine today?
The sad thing is that while I know that every Starbucks in the entire world will be exactly the same (and according to Wikipedia there are 15,011 branches in 44 countries) I will still go sheep-like unto the baristas for my Chai Tea Latte when I get the craving for some cinnamon.
Which is why we all flock there of course. It’s familiar. In a country like Japan, where both the spoken and written word is so completely different to English, Starbucks becomes a little island of reassuring American calm in a cacophony of kanji.
It’s why I wasn’t surprised, on entering the Starbucks closest to Kyoto station the day before yesterday, to find the entire place packed full of tourists at 9am. Your average westerner, faced with the prospect of a Japanese breakfast of grilled salmon, miso soup and rice, washed down with some green or barley tea, stares blankly for a few minutes and then cries, “… but where’s the coffee?” Desperate for caffeine, they crawl blindly from their ryokan, navigating only by the scent of freshly-ground coffee beans.
Rice for breakfast is also a bit of a leap. Rice for lunch? No problem. Rice for dinner? Sure! Rice… Breakfast? What? Breakfast as well? But Starbucks lures us in with the siren calls of scones, the melodic music of muffins, the call of cake. Hooray for processed wheat flour!
Back to the day before yesterday, and in I crawled, a fellow craver of caffeine. But ho! There was a queue! That selfsame Starbucks had been a breeze the previous day at 5pm. The staff were highly efficient and the process, I think, took slightly less time than my average Starbucks experience (and they all had better hair). So what was going on?
I began to eavesdrop, and it didn’t take long before the reason for the delay became clear.
The people at the front of the queue did not speak Starbucks.
I will just take a moment to explain something about the Starbucks in Japan. The menus are almost identical to those you’d find in a Starbucks in the U.S. or the U.K., only everything is transliterated into the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So I can waltz in there quite happily and order my “gurandei saizu no tazo chai tee ra-te kudasai” and be 100% sure that I will end up with exactly what I want. I’m not sure how it works in other countries, but I do suspect that (as a result of shrewd marketing on the part of the Starbucks chain) they will have followed this pattern with as many of the countries they have invaded moved into as possible. What could be easier? Instant oasis of American; no struggling with the menu. The same baked goods available in every café, the same drinks (with regional and seasonal variations to add interest), all adding to that cosy Starbucks feeling of familiarity.
So it was with shock and a little awe that I realised that the people at the front of the queue were painstakingly explaining what they wanted, in English, using such no-no Starbucks words as “large” and “coffee”. In the same sentence.
“A large coffee,” he said in that slow, careful voice that people use to talk to people of a different nationality. The barista looked a little embarrassed as she got out her demonstration cups with the air of a sex education teacher in her introductory class.
“Tall, grande, venti,” she said, indicating which was which, and modelling the words for the customer much as I would for my class of eight year olds with new vocabulary.
He pointed to the venti cup, and said again, “Coffee.”
The barista looked pained, and raised her menu, which has the Japanese and English names for each of the drinks listed side by side. “Many coffee,” she tried hesitantly, in English, “Which one?”
It occurred to me then, that (at least between English speaking countries and Japan) Starbucks has become New Esperanto; a language of universal expression. An Englishwoman and a Japanese can come together and communicate without barriers in the language of Coffee. Provided both parties are down with the lingo, successful transactions can be made again and again, with satisfaction on both sides. What business language can compare to that? Sure, nothing more complex than, “Do you want that to go?” can be expressed, but what does that matter? What more does the human race need?
I pity those who do not speak Starbucks. I can walk venti because I know that a Frappuccino is cold. I need fear nothing when I can ask for a tall Iced Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte without batting an eyelid. The revolution is coming, and it’s wearing a green apron.
Have you had your caffeine today?