It reinforces hierarchies but I hate it when the white guy behind me starts tailgating or honking the horn. When I’m standing in line and the clerk is slow, the white guy behind me starts fidgeting like it’s my fault.

Though it is painful to deal with, I witnessed one event last week where POC along with other fellow frustrated customers decided not to stand for such behavior.

One evening when I was picking up some Boston Chicken for dinner, I witnessed a POC way put a high and mighty White dude in his place way in front of me when he ranted about how he should be placed ahead of everyone else in line on account of his status as an attorney at some biglaw firm. The rest of us had a lot of fun piling on this arrogant overentitled asshole. The look on his face when a WOC called him a “glorified bureaucratic parasite” was priceless. Poor baby left in a huff not too long afterwards to our great relief.

It’s like driving a car. When the guy behind me is a white guy I move faster because I know he’ll make a BIG DEAL OUT OF IT if I don’t. If it’s a white woman or person of color, they won’t get ALL UP IN IT out of a sense of entitlement. I noticed the white guys at Starbucks and everywhere else act impatient sooner than anyone else.

Donna,

Know what you mean. Had to deal with that dynamic when I worked the cash register as an afterschool job in junior high/high school. Regardless of gender, it was White people who gave me the most grief along with occasional doses of racism on account of my Chinese ancestry whenever something sold out, I cannot give a refund on an item due to store policy, or whatever else the overentitled customers felt like ranting and raving about. The refund issue was the worst, especially when the store policy on refunds was clearly posted in large letters right in front of the register. And they had the temerity to imply that I was “undereducated”.

It was one reason I vowed to myself to never work retail service jobs again when I finished college.

There’s no distinction between, say, a double espresso and a grande soy dry caramel latte with cinnamon sprinkles. As anyone who’s ordered (or made) those drinks knows, that’s not really a good comparison. When I order a double espresso, it’s fast. When I order a triple vanilla latte with cocoa on top (yum) it’s slow.

I guess that answer actually depends on whether business has been busy enough that there’s already fresh steamed milk on hand. Steaming a pitcher takes about thirty seconds, pulling a double should take about twenty-five to thirty seconds. A triple takes around forty, which means that if you’re good, it should theoretically only take you about ten seconds longer to prepare a triple vanilla latte than a double espresso (assuming you have to steam milk in the first place).

Then again, that assumes there’s only one person working bar — if there’s one person steaming milk, and one person pulling shots, and one person making blended drinks, it throws everything into a tizzy.

No joke.

Hey now, hey now! No need to hate on the Gingerbread Latte, aka the only thing that makes my life worth living from November thru February!

I never said I completely hated the drinks Starbucks serves….just that they are grossly overpriced, especially if purchased on a daily basis.

Also, think of all the gingerbread villages and inhabitants that suffered so you can enjoy your gingerbread latte. ;)

/jk

Completely second that. Though I love the taste of coffee, I seldom patronize Starbucks or other boutique coffee shops because the idea of spending $3-6 for a cup of coffee strikes me as an absurd waste of money

Hey now, hey now! No need to hate on the Gingerbread Latte, aka the only thing that makes my life worth living from November thru February!

My experience, at least, has been that this holds true right up to the point where you’re too slammed to necessarily bend over backwards 100% of the time for every single customer, when you’re dealing with a server who is a) broke and b) needs/wants an extra buck more than they need/want to sit down for a few minutes or have a cigarette before they kill someone with a salad fork. Once the place is really busy, it can turn into an odds game pretty quickly, with the less-likely-to-tip-well customers being served perfunctorily in favor of buttering up the probable bigger tips. Of course, pegging someone as a poor tipper is largely going to be an esoteric process unless you recognize the customer, so there’s plenty of room for personal prejudice and anecdotal evidence to dictate strategies unsupported by empirical evidence.

And if you’re dealing with a server who isn’t a broke college student or someone equally strapped for cash, but instead a non-broke student working for, say, beer money, the bend over backwards for every customer thing becomes even less of a rule.

The servers I tip the least are the ones who are either patronizing or completely inattentive. The former category seems to comprise more men. The latter is pretty balanced.

Is it possible this is a “Let me just speak to your husband?” sort of phenomenon?