A Barista Spills the Beans: A Dark Roasted Tale About My Time At Starbucks

By P.N.M.I. Jameson

A Barista Spills The Beans is the story of my nine months as the world's oldest living barista at a Starbucks in suburban Minnesota.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543930566

Book preview

Art

CHAPTER ONE

The Cup's Half Empty If You're Lucky

I know that there are many, many well-run, high functioning, productive Starbucks in the world. The year this story takes place, 2006, ours, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them.

The ship called Starbucks had long since sailed. The company was solidly anchored in back then with more than 17,000 stores in 49 countries and 5 continents. Made in China, too, of course.

Our store had four managers in the nine months I worked there, including my two training managers and the interim who took over after the first manager got canned.

I became a Starbucks barista for the same reason most people do – insurance. My health insurance, which we used to call medical insurance back in the 80s, when I had none, covered just about nothing and had gone up for the 6th time in 4 years.

I had been making about a hundred dollars a week at my part-time job at the older ladies British and Scandinavian Isles gift shop, where I was the only employee anywhere near fifty, and I was paying three-fourths and a half of that a month for insurance. I’m clinically, chronically depressed and was therefore considered uninsurable even in our blue, liberal state.

But the state’s benefits were killing me. My salt and pepper gray roots were creeping out, I hadn’t seen a dentist in a long time, and I was 4 years overdue for a routine colonoscopy. I was pushing 56 and figured it was time for me to get a job that paid more than $7.50 an hour and discounts.

So, if you think this is going to be of those perky, upbeat stories about how working at a coffee shop inspired me or saved my life, you should stop reading now.

I am not at this time, and never have been, a nine to five type who can sit at a desk all day long pretending to accomplish something while struggling to keep myself as brain-dead as possible as my life leaks away into oblivion.

My computer skills are antique, laughable and shaggy. I have faked my way through being a legal secretary; the office manager at a children’s hospital, allergy division; an acting, voice and screenwriting teacher. I have probably had hundreds of jobs, counting all the temporary office work in big cities, and handing out flyers for art galleries, and waitressing jobs anywhere from a day or two to a couple of weeks to several months and once almost two years.

Clyde Vinson, a lovely man from Texas that I studied voice with in the 70s in NYC, once said that if all the actors, artists, dancers, musicians, and writers in Chicago, New York, and LA took the same day off, all the restaurants and offices would have to shut down.

At the Older Ladies Double Heritage Gift and Clothing Shop in suburban Minnesota where I had worked for the last several years, the median age for clientele and workers was 70 plus. We were much more likely to lose customers to assisted living or end-of-life issues than to commercial fickleness or fashion faux pauxs.

Everyone was part-time, mostly retired teachers. Employees would actually split the longer, 7 hour shifts into 3 ½ hour singles. Everyone called each other girls except for me who kept to the more contemporary women.

A former grade school teacher there who looked fabulous and was very smart – tall, slim and energetic – had been widowed twice, and swore she would never marry again since no one could ever compare to her two excellent, now late, former husbands.

But then a lady in her church got cancer, and she and a friend visited her and her husband in the hospital for months, and one thing led to another, till soon after the woman’s death she and the widower, who each had four kids, were sneaking out nightly to see each other for about a year, and then finally got married. I told her she was the poster woman for later in life marriages.

One day I was trying to help a much older woman, at least ninety, select an outfit. She was there with her daughter who had to be pushing 70 and was pleasant enough. But the mother clearly trusted neither my judgment nor my taste. On our third attempt to find something she complained to her daughter in a loud, plaintive stage whisper, Where are the older women today? Aren’t any of the older women working today? Things like that were always happening at the Older Ladies Gift Shop.

At Christmas there would be long lines of older women waiting for the free gift wrapping, three or four mugs clutched in each hand, everyone a separately wrapped gift.

We’d have sales after all the holidays, and then the boss would mark things right back up two or three weeks later. Year after year after year.

Much of the merchandise had been in the store for quite a few years, usually in the same location. I called Christmas the Night of the Living Shoppers. When things got bad, like with the multiple gift wrappings, I’d sometimes wear my delicate stone insect Christmas Cockroach pin and pretend to be Irish or French or Hungarian. The place was staffed, supported and frequented by Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes, and I was educated at great length by everyone about the important differences. One co-worker even called me at half-time from her grandson’s football game to inform me that they were selling lefse in the stands. She thought I should know.

There were signs and posters for each ethnic group, like Parking For Swedes Only and Finns Do It Better. One poster touted The 50 Emotions of Minnesotans, with 50 different descriptive words and one repeating, expressionless face.

The gift shop was one of the first places I drove to when I finally learned to drive, to get their Irish black tea. I figured if I could drive there I could work there. So I did, for four years.

I had a thing about driving, and I’d lived mostly in big cities, so I didn’t have to worry about it. Or I did have a thing, until my soon-to-be-husband insisted I learn to drive just before we got married, when I was turning 50.

I had passed the driver’s test once back in Chicago in the mid- 80s, after I had pretended to be driving a car in rush hour traffic in Madison, Wisconsin, when I played the lead in an independent movie, Frame of Mind.

At one point it had the subtitle A Parapsychological Thriller, which made a friend ask me, What does that mean? Did all the ghosts whisper? It never got distribution, so it only played at a few art houses, overseas in a French and an Italian film festival, and on a couple of campuses.

In this movie, I was driving while two camera guys and the director were crammed into the back seat, with a sound woman in the trunk and an understandably anxious actor next to me in the passenger seat. A small tech person, curled up at my feet, operated the brakes. I figured having got through that I could easily pass a driver’s test back home in Illinois. Which I did, the second time around, since I got way overconfident on the first and rolled right through a stop sign.

After that test, I never drove. But I did get a certificate from the Illinois DMV for eight years of safe driving when my wallet was stolen in Chicago, and I had to renew my license with only a photograph and no test that time. Thanks be.

Forward to ten years later. I am living in the chilly climes of Minnesota, still not driving. By the time we had lived together for three years in an apartment and then were purchasing our first house, my future husband said I had to drive.

It took six times and hypnosis. The first time I rammed my future father-in-law’s car into somebody’s backyard in very deep mud. Had to ask the nice driving test guy, who was kind and helpful, to take over and get us out. Cried all the way home, and shelled out four hundred dollars for repairs.

Second time I got the crabby old man. Noticed a new fence up where I had crashed into the backyard. The tester was testy, and I got cranky,

Reviews for A Barista Spills the Beans

[Terry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Starbucks. Sounds mighty, larger than life. These 100 pages or so bring it back down to planet earth. By exposing the ‘soul’ of this American institution, she lets us know a bit more of ourselves. Refreshingly simple and tasteful; enjoy the journey she sets out for you.