Coffee Café Vagrancy
1 May 2006
I popped into Starbucks for a cuppa this morning and turned into a vagrant loitering for hours. The scary thing is that I was not alone.
Though I normally frequent coffee cafés that sell tea and milk that have been harvested from shaded fields on cooperative farms (rather than fields clear-cut from shrinking jungles for covetous corporate agriculture and grazing), Starbucks ensnared me. And that’s because they’re everywhere now!
Almost on every other street corner, everywhere!
In other words, if you’re feeling impatient for that cuppa, and not quite willing to hang out until you’ve arrived at your fave indie café, Starbucks will get you.
You will be lured in by convenience and then you will be stuck.
Stuck, because once you’re inside one of those convenience coffee cafés it’s so neat and tidy, clean and nice, and the beverages are so sweet, you’re addicted.
Even the muffins and scones are really sweet and muffins and scones are not supposed to be that sweet. But Starbuck’s muffins and scones are sweet because the Starbucks pastry people know that sugar is addictive and that if you eat it you want more! Oh those cunning corporate pastry people.
Then there are those big comfy armchairs! Cripes, you feel as though you’ve stumbled into a Californian furniture showroom when you sit down with your cuppa at Starbucks. No wonder people plop into those armchairs with their laptops and coffees and don’t get up for hours.
It’s easy to hangout when you’re so comfy and sugared up. And did I mention it’s easy to doze off at Starbucks?
Never mind that coffee and tea and sugar are supposed to be stimulants, I mean you sit in one of those comfy armchairs, put your feet up on the matching coffee table, browse the various local papers that are strewn around, catch a bit of morning sun streaming through yonder windows and voila, suddenly you’re nodding off!
And the scary thing is, you’re not alone. People hang out at Starbucks so they can have a public nap for an hour or so.
By the end of the morning, I guarantee, the nice young Starbuck’s employees don’t dare attempt to shoo out the vagrant persons who’ve dropped in for a bit of comfort, because it’s impossible to tell the vagrants from the patrons.
I’ve decided to be more patient next time I want a cuppa. I’m very concerned that if I don’t, I might get lured back into Starbucks where I’ll be recognized not as a patron, but as a tea-drinker with a penchant for snoozing off in public - in other words, just another Starbucks vagrant.
