HOME |
RSS | 
Jonathan Stark is either a marketer or someone performing a strange social experiment. Either way, he has offered up his Starbucks card for free public use. Surprisingly, people have continued to add money to it, so the card has continued to be useable for a long time now. You can even check the balance on the card before you order up a drink by following the automatically updated Twitter feed.
Link Via The Consumerist
So, here we have Dirk Benedict, who played Lt. Starbuck in the classic Battlestar Galactica, with Katee Sackhoff, who played Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in the modern Battlestar Galactica, in a Starbucks coffee shop. The mind reels.
Link | Photo: unknown
Starbucks is now offering the trenta size, which is just one ounce short of a full quart. Sadly, it will not be available for straight coffee — just icy drinks. In this infographic, Andrew Barr of Canada’s National Post points out that this size is larger than the average adult stomach capacity.
Link — Thanks, Jeremy! | Image: National Post, used with permission.
Did you just get a cup of coffee (oh, I’m sorry … venti non-fat extra dry cappuccino) from Starbucks? Did you know that you’ve just ordered 1 of the 87,000 possible combinations of drinks there?
Brynn Mannino of Woman’s Day wrote an interesting article about the 9 Things You Didn’t Know About Starbucks:
1. There are over 87,000 drink combination possibilities.
We knew they had a big menu, but 87,000 options? In 2008, the company included this number as part of a full-page advertisement in two national newspapers. Starbucks spokeswoman Lisa Passe explained how they came up with it to a Wall Street Journal blogger: "If you take all of our core beverages, multiply them by the modifiers and the customization options, you get more than 87,000 combinations.”
Lynn Rosenthal, a college professor of English, is a stickler for correct grammar. She doesn’t approve of Starbucks’ word usage, and after an argument with a barista, she was forcibly removed from a Starbucks location in New York City:
“I just wanted a multigrain bagel,” Rosenthal told The Post. “I refused to say ‘without butter or cheese.’ When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want.
“Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English.”
Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain’s stilted lexicon — balking at ordering a “tall” or a “venti” from the menu or specifying “no whip.”
Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a “small” or “large” cup of joe.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo by Flickr user tristanf used under Creative Commons license
Stupid: Robbing a Starbucks
Stupider: Cutting in line to rob a Starbucks
Even more stupider: the people you cut are police officers.
Neatorama-worthy: IN UNIFORM!
According to police, a short time later the officers were inside the coffee shop ordering at the till when the man they had spoken with outside walked directly up to the till, threw a drink at the employee and demanded cash.
"[The officers] looked at each other in astonishment that someone would attempt that with two uniform officers in the room," Sgt. Bruce Carrie told ctvbc.ca.
Link – via The Consumerist
Howdy Neatoramanauts! I’m happy to say that we’ve made some new friends at The Toilet Paper, a daily email magazine filled with neat facts and a lot of humor. TTP, as they like to be called, is a lot like Neatorama – but in an email form. They’re also much more organized and generous (as in sponsoring a free T-shirt contest. More on that later.)
Because you’re reading this blog, you’re already likely to a) be good at this Interweb thing and b) like fun facts and random neat things. The Toilet Paper tackles a different topic every day – like current events and such – and break each topic into interesting stats, quotes, word definition, and lists (didn’t I tell you they’re organized?)
Take, for example, the big topic of last week: Starbucks and Guns
The Toilet Paper emails are quick and fun reads (don’t you like the example above? Not convinced? They have an archive going back all the way to January 2009. Their blog ain’t too shabby either) – we betcha that by the second day you’ll start looking forward to reading your emails for the daily TTPs. We wouldn’t suggest them if we weren’t already hooked.
Because they’re such awesome people, The Toilet Paper is sponsoring what is probably the easiest contest we ever had on Neatorama: 6 lucky winners, selected from new sign ups for the daily emails, will each get 3 free T-shirts of their choice from the Neatorama Shop.
To enter this neat contest, sign up for The Toilet Paper here: Link. Good luck and happy readings!
Comments Off
Starbucks launched their campaign against AIDS in Africa by putting together singers from 156 countries in one video performing The Beatles’ song All You Need is Love. Link -via Buzzfeed
What do you do with all those drink holders you’ve accumulated from Starbucks? (You didn’t throw ‘em away, did you?)
Well, Wired contributing photographer Dan Winters make something out of his: a Star Wars TIE Fighter made out of 50 Starbucks cups, 216 stirrers and over 60 drink holders.
After he was fired from his executive job, Michael Gates Gill was devastated. Soon after he was laid off and got divorced – and when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, he got diagnosed with a brain tumor.
At the lowest point in his life, Michael walked into a Starbucks store while it was holding a jobs fair. On a whim he applied for a position.
Starbucks may be $4 cup of coffee to you and me, but to Michael, it was a lifesaver:
After 26 years at J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising agency, the then 63-year-old Gill was invited to an early breakfast and was told that he was getting the boot. He made too much money. Someone younger would work for less, he was told.
"Never go out to breakfast," he warns before bursting into laughter. "It’s like the Mafia. You will never return."
He can joke about it now, but Gill says he was devastated by his firing. "I remember walking outside and bursting into tears," he says over a steaming cup of coffee at his current place of employment, a Starbucks in Bronxville, New York. "I was stunned. I knew that that part of my life was over."
That was just the start of a terrible reversal of fortune. In a few short years, Gill, the Yale-educated son of the famed New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, closed the consulting business he started after he was laid off, got divorced and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had hit both the rock and the bottom and was continuing to fall.
A trip to Starbucks would irrevocably change his life, he says. Unbeknownst to him, the coffee shop was holding a hiring fair the morning he walked in for his daily dose of caffeine. A manager approached him and asked if he would like to apply for a job. Without thinking, he said yes.
