Splash-Sticks and Spoodles
March 29, 2008
Remember the story of the woman who stowed a cup of McDonald's coffee between her knees before driving away in her car? The coffee spilled, and, evidently to her great astonishment, the woman got burned because the coffee was hot. She had the unmitigated gall to sue McDonald's, and while I doubt that anyone was fooled into believing that the hot coffee was the real problem in that scenario, from then on all self-respecting purveyors of hot coffees started researching better-fitting lids, and printing cups saying something to the effect of, "CAREFUL: THE BEVERAGE YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENJOY IS EXTREMELY HOT." Starbucks emphatically included.
Well, apparantly the customers still haven't caught on, and we're pandering even further to their stupidity. The sip-lids that Starbucks puts on all of its cups have a little drinking hole at one end. These lids are produced specially for Starbucks by SOLO. Some stores--in Brooklyn, for example--also carry flat lids, the kind associated with Maxwell House vending machines, which are completely sealed except for a peel-back drinking hole like a soda can. Not sexy, but effective. These are useful for people taking trays of drinks to meetings, always assuming that it isn't totally moronic to be travelling with several lattes that will inevitably be cold by the time you arrive at your destination. You can at least drive your tepid coffee to a nice cozy spot on Makeout Hill without worrying about spills on the upholstery.
However, Starbucks apparantly feels that their sip lids say a certain something that a flat lid simply does not, so they have introduced The Splash Stick. It's pretty much a little plastic plug to put in the drinking hole of your sip lid. These will be introduced within the next two weeks (if you haven't seen them already) as part of Starbucks' Spring Phase 2. All I have to say is WOW. Another excellent use of our natural resources. Instead of encouraging people to stop driving around with their goddam coffee, or (still more unthinkable) sitting in the café to drink it, we're creating a whole new line of useless plastic toys that we'll find littered in the street along with the already-too-prevalant cups, sleeves, and lids. Congratulations, humanity! I'll post pictures as soon as I get a chance.
Another brilliant innovation that will be introduced during our brewed-coffee meeting next Sunday (the follow-up to the previous meeting about espresso beverages) is The Spoodle. As its name suggests, it is a cross between a ladle and a spoon. (It also happens to be a cross between a Spaniel and a Poodle. And you can bet that in our discussion of the coming meeting, we came up with a number of more interesting possible definitions of Spoodle: a curly straw in a fruit juice cocktail; a kind of awkward, tufted bird featured in Audobon Magazine; a brightly-colored sex toy that hums, whistles, and lights up every time you throw the switch; and don't even get us started on the verb forms of the word.)
Well, Starbucks has decided that in the name of quality control we will henceforth brew fresh urns of coffee every 30 minutes, instead of every hour. Fine, I'm sure it will be tastier (and hotter) that way. But someone must have pointed out that if the company initiates this policy and continues distributing pre-packed bullets of ground coffee suitable for a full urn, it will lead to a lot of waste. So the pre-packs have been recalled. We'll be brewing through the remainders over the coming week, and after that we will grind the day's beans directly from 5-lb. bags, and measure out grounds for each batch to suit the customer flow. This is where the Spoodle comes in. With it, we can measure grounds to match the size of the coffee batch. During peak hours, we will brew full urns, just as usual, but in the evenings we can scale back to quarter-batches to reduce the amount of coffee poured down the sink every 30 minutes. Beans will be ground fresh every morning, and the leftover grounds will be discarded at night. A tidy system, until you consider the size of the company, the time it takes to brew coffee, and the impatience of undercaffeinated customers. I've said it before, but I just don't know that this is going to work. Can a coffee empire afford to "handcraft" its product?
Well, apparantly the customers still haven't caught on, and we're pandering even further to their stupidity. The sip-lids that Starbucks puts on all of its cups have a little drinking hole at one end. These lids are produced specially for Starbucks by SOLO. Some stores--in Brooklyn, for example--also carry flat lids, the kind associated with Maxwell House vending machines, which are completely sealed except for a peel-back drinking hole like a soda can. Not sexy, but effective. These are useful for people taking trays of drinks to meetings, always assuming that it isn't totally moronic to be travelling with several lattes that will inevitably be cold by the time you arrive at your destination. You can at least drive your tepid coffee to a nice cozy spot on Makeout Hill without worrying about spills on the upholstery.
However, Starbucks apparantly feels that their sip lids say a certain something that a flat lid simply does not, so they have introduced The Splash Stick. It's pretty much a little plastic plug to put in the drinking hole of your sip lid. These will be introduced within the next two weeks (if you haven't seen them already) as part of Starbucks' Spring Phase 2. All I have to say is WOW. Another excellent use of our natural resources. Instead of encouraging people to stop driving around with their goddam coffee, or (still more unthinkable) sitting in the café to drink it, we're creating a whole new line of useless plastic toys that we'll find littered in the street along with the already-too-prevalant cups, sleeves, and lids. Congratulations, humanity! I'll post pictures as soon as I get a chance.
Another brilliant innovation that will be introduced during our brewed-coffee meeting next Sunday (the follow-up to the previous meeting about espresso beverages) is The Spoodle. As its name suggests, it is a cross between a ladle and a spoon. (It also happens to be a cross between a Spaniel and a Poodle. And you can bet that in our discussion of the coming meeting, we came up with a number of more interesting possible definitions of Spoodle: a curly straw in a fruit juice cocktail; a kind of awkward, tufted bird featured in Audobon Magazine; a brightly-colored sex toy that hums, whistles, and lights up every time you throw the switch; and don't even get us started on the verb forms of the word.)
Well, Starbucks has decided that in the name of quality control we will henceforth brew fresh urns of coffee every 30 minutes, instead of every hour. Fine, I'm sure it will be tastier (and hotter) that way. But someone must have pointed out that if the company initiates this policy and continues distributing pre-packed bullets of ground coffee suitable for a full urn, it will lead to a lot of waste. So the pre-packs have been recalled. We'll be brewing through the remainders over the coming week, and after that we will grind the day's beans directly from 5-lb. bags, and measure out grounds for each batch to suit the customer flow. This is where the Spoodle comes in. With it, we can measure grounds to match the size of the coffee batch. During peak hours, we will brew full urns, just as usual, but in the evenings we can scale back to quarter-batches to reduce the amount of coffee poured down the sink every 30 minutes. Beans will be ground fresh every morning, and the leftover grounds will be discarded at night. A tidy system, until you consider the size of the company, the time it takes to brew coffee, and the impatience of undercaffeinated customers. I've said it before, but I just don't know that this is going to work. Can a coffee empire afford to "handcraft" its product?
Starbucks is silly.
i have a question. what happens to all those coffee grounds?
milos, which is a very small chain of hamburger restaurants in the south, sells a lot of iced tea. they also sell it by the gallon jug in local groceries. they are a hamburger chain, so they do the mass-market-meat thing, which is of course a whole different set of problems and much worse than wasting tea leaves. but, they do go through a lot of tea leaves. so anyway, they started saving all their tea leaves, and got Auburn university to figure out a way to make effective mulch from them (acidity+absorption=not great mulch with tea leaves alone) and now they recycle all the tea leaves and sell it as mulch --> customers thinking the company is "green" --> happy customers --> larger profits (plus the money made from selling the mulch, although that probably just makes up for the cost of saving tea leaves instead of throwing them out).
my favorite lids are these:
http://www.popgadget.net/images/lid_animation.gif
but maybe starbucks could increase the discount offered if one brings one's own cup? then no worries about lids or suing-- b/c it's *your* cup. for idiots on that front i think this is great:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/12/scicup112.xml
Those are some nifty lids.
The grounds go exactly where you would expect: in the garbage.
In the spring stores are encouraged to save them, bag them, and place bins of bagged grounds near the entries. These are free to anyone who wants them, and we get shiny new signs saying, "Grounds For Your Garden!" But it is definitely a limited, seasonal offering.
I've noticed (as you have, I'm sure) that there is a contingent of folks who are rather anti-'Bucks. It can be said that we all may be predisposed to believe (based on well-publicized indiscretions) that large corporations generally perpetrate large evils. Hyperbole aside, there's often some truth in this. I have given Starbucks a break in this regard.
I just read the Michael Pollan article about the company, and I agree with his statement that they have changed the expectation of what a cup of coffee should be like after decades of American consumption of processed, freeze-dried brown sawdust. He also goes on to say that Starbucks does its best to lead with quality over quantity, and the changes you note here speak to this. They were smart to back off the food-serving business as they recently did. I think that may have freed up some revenue to invest in a more hand-crafted product.
That said, I must sheepishly cop to the fact that I buy exclusively from a local roaster, but when I am away from Portland, I always seek out a Starbucks as my go-to source for quality caffeination.
Don't get me wrong--I have been a Starbucks afficionado since my early teens, and on the whole I am proud of the coffee that we serve and the standard that we represent. Speaking generally, the recent changes in policy and practice, refocusing on coffee as the principal business of the company, have boded very well. I also have soft spot for Starbucks because it originated in Seattle, and the northwest will forever have certain claims on my affections.
But with every improvement in the product's quality--like the spoodle--there seems to be a kind of kickback--like a Splash Stick. I'm not slamming Starbucks specifically, I'm just venting a little spleen about corporate America and consumerism at large. Assuming that whether or not we really need a $5 latte is a moot point, do we really need a Splash Stick to protect ourselves from that latte?
(And since I just brought it up, I may as well observe that one of my pet peeves is customers complaining about the price of their drinks. Do they realize how far those coffee beans have come, the amount of labor and packaging involved, the pittance that the farmer probably earned? "CONGRATULATIONS!" I usually tell them, loudly. "You've just exercised your freedom of choice!")
I think that most companies need a splash stick equivalent to protect themselves from the ever-increasing litigiousness of society. When warnings are put on a jar of peanuts for peanut allergies (CONTAINS PEANUTS!), or when a local company like Smiling Hill Farm has to recall product in order to hand-relabel their Egg Nog with the warning "CONTAINS EGGS," I cannot even feign surprise at things like splash sticks anymore. This sort of foolishness has atrophied my ability to be taken aback any longer.
When I was a boy, we boiled water over the fire, threw in a handfull of dirt, and called it coffee...AND WE LIKED IT.
Thanks, Dad. :-)
Dad is an idiot. Life is different now and spills are an everyday occurrence and sometimes serious. The splash stick is a positive move for corporate responsibility and I appreciate them for leading the way and offering a solution!
Corporate responsibility, my ass. Starbucks couldn't even bring itself to take responsibility for mistakenly "separating" a lowly barista like me.
As Rob observed, Starbucks is ensuring that nobody can sue them for getting burned, after having had a barista plug that measly hole with a straw or a sticker. Nothing more.
Depending on the location of the SBUX, I would guess, Grounds for Your Garden can be, and is, a year-round effort. My wife gets grounds from the SBUX we frequent all year long to put into her gardens and flower beds. Additionally, they are very good as an additive to the lawn as they tend to break down the clay soil.
I would love to know more of the "facts" surrounding the mistaken "'separating' a lowly barista like me" in the case of Ms. Lohrenz. It would boggle the mind to believe there was absolutely NO justification for the termination; however, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and know more of the story.
The stir sticks are, probably, a result of both customer suggestions and, possibly, a bow to avoiding litigation. Whatever the genesis, they are a good idea even if they are made of plastic and will, I'm certain, have some up in arms about the perceived "environmental irresponsibility."
It isn't really even about "protecting" ourselves, as it were. It's simply that the sip lids and the force required to hold the cup with your fist don't work for people who aren't going to be sitting down in a chair to drink it immediately. Adults with good hand-eye coordination are still going to get splashed no matter how careful they are. I never burn myself, I just get splashed with coffee drips that inevitably stain something. My coat and handbag are testaments to this. Just simply walking on level ground from store to car door. But I don't blame the store for it, I imagine some folks would.
I don't begrudge the splash stick. I just wish they would push the "re-use" angle a little more so millions of them don't end up in the garbage.
For what it's worth - I've been to 3 different local Starbucks over the past week and I haven't seen even one of them. Nor have I been served a retro brown logo cup either. I go back and forth between Starbucks and another national coffee chain, and I was jazzed to see what the "new" stuff was all about, but I've yet to see any of it! I didn't know about the splash sticks til I read a blurb about them on the net! I'm not in some obscure location either - a major metro.