The truth about Starbucks pt. 2

The truth about Starbucks pt. 2

by Asa Montreaux

The truth about Starbucks is they have only hired me a few times over the years. Each time I go in, and I work a little, and then I have to quit. Because it is impossible to go through the mandatory coffee tasting, and free drinks, all the time. You instantly have to go to the bathroom.

I could have said it was about school, or another work any time previously, and I obviously used both reasons as excuses. They offered few hours, and had several employees, so it was never an issue at any Starbucks location. But the last time I worked there, I hadn’t really had much of a reason to say no thank you. But I quit quicker than ever before. 

I had learned a trick for working in them. You cut your hours down to three, four hours, and you make it through. But the “manager” of this Starbucks would only negotiate down to six hours. So on my first day, already through five hours, suddenly I had to go to the bathroom. 

But the reality is, so had every employee. I had to think back to see I had seen everyone go into the bathroom, and heard them have explosive diarrhea. There had also been several customers that went to the bathroom with the same diarrhea. When I felt it, I knew I had to go right away, and I knew it might not go away as well. I sat back down, my second coffee drink of the shift, which they gave me no choice but to order, in front of me. I felt fine for a while. Then, the sick stomach started up again, and I knew I had to leave. So I ran out of the store. The woman who served me the bad coffee screamed, “Andrew”, but I literally had to go to the bathroom so I kept moving.

I used the bathroom at a different store. I felt a little better afterwards, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to work the last hour. I quickly went back and said I threw up, instead of admit to the diarrhea, and said I had to go home. The manager said it was okay, and I left.

The next day, I knew it was impossible to work there. When I had gotten home, the smell of Starbucks coffee was all over my clothes. It was horribly strong. It was even on my skin. I returned to the toilet a couple times though not much came out.

It wasn’t possible to sit in a Starbucks for a whole day. And it wasn’t possible to drink a whole coffee without having to go to the bathroom.

The worst thing about the experience, was the first thing is you must taste the house brew with the manager. The “Pike’s Place” was horrible. But I lied it wasn’t. It tasted like nuts lightly covered with cocoa. But there was a very bitter taste as well. And as you finished a sip, you could taste it. It tasted exactly like shit. In fact, as you got near the bottom of the coffee, there was like a lump in it. A big one, almost too thick to drink. And it tasted more and more like shit as you finished the coffee.

About the second coffee. I asked for a white hot chocolate to get around consuming more caffeine, thinking that might be the problem around why I sometimes have to use the bathroom at Starbucks. But though she repeated white hot chocolate to me, she wrote white mocha. Which is basically a coffee drink. And when I asked for a tall, she strongly recommended a grande. I wanted to tell the women, lady, the coffee is on you. 

As I watched them make it, there was something wrong. The barista poured a little milk in, but filled the rest with air from the latte machine. There was already espresso sauce in it, but then she added in coffee. It was the most mysterious thing I’ve ever seen. But I was pretending not to watch half the time, so I figured I ought to just give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw enough that it wouldn’t kill me, and I wasn’t 100 percent sure she poured in coffee twice, because she’d been making two drinks at the same time, and with three cups. But it amounted to a tainting. Because she had poured in coffee and not just the espresso syrup. And I had to head right to the bathroom.

I was embarrassed. And the next day I decided just to write an email and resign. I blocked all their emails, and never had a chat with them again. I received two checks from them. One for that one day, and one for one day of vacation. Other than that, there was no communication between us that I received. 

The worst thing about the parade to the bathroom, is right before my second bout, the guy who I shared the coffee with needed the bathroom too. It was the manager. You could hear the diarrhea, and I felt the overwhelming desire to quite because he framed me while he was in there. He was saying, “This is Andrew in here”, and “Andrew this is you”. I appreciate that he gave me a job offer, but he had nefarious intentions all along. And one of them was to leave this out. Most customers said he could never spend a day in there without getting diarrhea and going to the bathroom like that. It was a scam in which you really couldn’t even go on working there any amount of time. If you wanted to advance to Manager from cashier, it was impossible.

About how I had worked there previously, I had not gone into deep detail, I had just mentioned working at one in a different country. So where do the managers come from? He said his name was Collin, which was the name of a childhood best friend of mine. And a couple hours in to the shift he called me into the backroom to set up some Starbucks employee accounts. And of course there was already one. When he pulled it up, it was already set up, and the first security question was, what was the name of your childhood best friend?

The man had possibly tried to steal my identity. Due to the complex nature of the situation, I can’t at length go into the details of this now, but it seems he had tried in other aspects of my life. And may be trying to strike again, or may strike again one day. I would ask him to calm down, and reconsider what he is doing. And choose the path of peace, and respect for one another.

Starbucks is a scam, whether you try to work there, or try them as a customer.

To be continued…

***

Update to story:

After thinking about it, after finding that something was floating, crumbling in the coffee, I find that I had probably been a victim of the persons paper mache, glitter flaked costume. It obviously was something I was swallowing that was not supposed to be there.

In terms of my White Mocha, in terms of the mix, it was just supposed to be white foam, so what ever seemed black floating in it, was probably the same thing,  the thorns swirling in them. It seemed by then I was nearly bleeding internally.

I leave it up to you to decide whether mass produced coffee comes up highly fertilized short shrubs, or grown flush trees. But I leave you with one last image. You know those egg and biscuit sandwiches you buy there? They'd been sitting on the floor, all day and all night. It may seem someone does not care if there's something on their hands. It may seem the company doesn't care enough whether you get a little sick.