The "Coffee Shop"

I don't like Starbucks. The coffee is lousy, the atmosphere is, as we used to say in the 70s, plastic, and the baristas, while they may be perfectly normal people off-duty, come across as little robots. And the whole tone is smarmy politically correct. It's not about service or quality -- it's about marketing. I used to hang out in a real coffee shop, which was as much a social club as a place to get coffee. Sadly, it succumbed to the economic pressures of the times.

I might have known Starbucks were fundamentally sleazy. (Sorry, don't mean to make a class-action slur here, but have you noticed that there's something fairly unwholesome about the contemporary corporate manager type -- not the real managers, but the ones who have the stockpile of "management" jargon, the ones who really buy into the whole shtick. (One of my favorites coming out of my own milieu recently is "lifetstyle relevance." That one even has the distinction of possibly meaning something.)

Superior Court judge on Thursday ordered Starbucks Corp. to pay its California baristas more than $100 million in back tips and interest that the coffee chain paid to shift supervisors.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett also issued an injunction that prevents Starbucks' shift supervisors from sharing in future tips, saying state law prohibits managers and supervisors from sharing in employee gratuities. . . .

The lawsuit was filed in October 2004 by Jou Chou, a former Starbucks barista in La Jolla, who complained shift supervisors were sharing in employee tips.

Tell me Starbucks' lawyers didn't know the law.

I'm actually thinking of filing a complaint against Starbucks here because of Chicago's non-smoking laws, which stipulate that you can't smoke within fifteen feet of the entrance of a public building. Starbucks now has signs that you can't smoke within fifteen feet of their outdoor seating areas, which are sections of public walk they use under license from the city. I think they're overreaching a little.