I am hopelessly addicted to caramel macchiatos. I’ll admit it. I have been for nine years, since I was an undergrad at Grand Valley State and discovered them there. Since leaving GVSU, I’ve found the best at Starbucks–which is to say I can find them at all. Coffee Beanery and Caribou Coffee don’t make them. God only knows why.
I know I could make them at home, but I don’t. Probably because I’m too lazy to steam milk and we don’t have an espresso machine. Which is okay. I’ll willingly fork over my $3-$4 a pop and stimulate the economy for my nirvana in a cup. I drink other things, too (white mochas, peppermint mochas, pumpkin spice lattes, and the “London Fog”–an earl grey latte, all of these among other things) but I generally default to a caramel macchiato. I can walk into my “usual” Starbucks at John R and 16, or the one at the mall, and they generally know what I’m going to order–and they know me by name, rather than by my drink.
The past couple days on the way to the university, I’ve stopped at another Starbucks, the one at Rochester and South. I looked at my cup today and got to thinking. At that Starbucks, they print up a label for your cup and slap it on there and hand it to the barista making the drinks. At the other Starbucks I go to, they take a marker and write it on your cup. For some reason, I like that way better. Maybe it’s because it feels more hand-crafted, with the half-intelligible symbols for a drink scribbled on the cup. More leisurely, more old-timey (as if Starbucks could feel “old-timey”). I don’t know. I just like it better. Maybe I’m strange. Maybe it’s just…one of those things, a little quirk. But that’s what I think I like better than this little printed label that says in plain English what I’ve ordered.
So give my my arrows and my three letter codes for what I’ve asked for. I know what an upside down caramel macchiato looks like on my cup. And any self-respecting Starbucks customer should know what their code looks like, too.
