Let it go lad
Starbucks drama king still yelling and screaming about his tedious game of Pretend I’m a Woman Or Else.
A video of the incident went viral, but Ms Spain has broken her silence, claiming that the footage does not tell the whole story.
She insisted: ‘I’m the victim of a transphobic hate crime, but I’m being treated like a criminal. The viral video doesn’t show the customer calling us trannies and going on a rant about gender.
‘It doesn’t show how it started with her screaming about why we don’t accept cash and demanding that we do. The internet’s been filled with lies.’
Nobody cares, child. The way to deal with an unreasonably angry customer is to be very detached and calm and non-reactive, not to fly into a screaming rage and clap your hands in her face.
Ms Thomas claimed the whole row stemmed from her using the word ‘lady’ to describe a member of staff serving her without realising that they did not identify as a woman.
They were discussing why Starbucks did not accept cash and as Ms Spain, who was standing nearby intervened, Ms Thomas claims that she told her: ‘I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the lady behind the counter.’
This prompted Ms Spain, who was standing close by, to confront her for using the wrong gender to describe her colleague.
Ms Spain insisted that Ms Thomas’s use of the word ‘lady’ was ‘deliberate and spiteful’.
Other way around, chum. It’s this stupid and ludicrous idea that people have to pretend that strangers are a customized sex that they obviously aren’t, when all we want to do is get our coffee or pay for our tomatoes and bread or get to our destination and walk away, that is Deliberate and Spiteful. Nobody cares. Nobody. Nobody cares about other people’s luxury pronouns, or their highly polished gender identity. It’s extremely simple: nobody you encounter in shops or coffee places or buses or dressing rooms is as interested in you as you are. This is one of the first things people need to learn about the world, and it’s tragic to see how badly the pronoun people have been neglected here. What were their parents and teachers doing???
I wonder if he’ll still be raving about the Starbucks Karen 50 years from now.
Of course he will. This is his moment of glory in the spotlight, fighting the good fight. No need to worry about developing skills or talents, or bothering with accomplishment and acheivement when he’s got this to remember and retell.
There should be a BALLAD.
Someone on Ovarit suggested the other day that one of the reasons this guy may have freaked out is that by calling the other barista a ‘lady’ she was implying, somehow, that this guy wasn’t one.
THIS. How many times does it need to be said?
Obnoxious narcissists are just so damned tiresome to deal with. Sigh.
‘Ms Thomas claimed the whole row stemmed from her using the word ‘lady’ to describe a member of staff serving her without realising that they did not identify as a woman.’
But why on earth should the customer know the ‘gender’ of the member of staff she was speaking to? They had never been introduced. I do not suppose that the member of staff was carrying a placard stating her ‘gender’, or wearing some sort of large, readily visible badge that stated it.
A BALLAD, a whole BALLAD?
Oh, I forbid ye ladies a’
Unless ye hae nae fear,
To come or gae by Starbuck Ha’
For fell Ms Spain works there.
There’s nane that gaes to Starbuck Ha’
But they maun get the pronouns reet,
Gif they ken, or gif they dinna,
Else Ms Spain will greet.
(‘greet’ in Scots means cry or whimper)
But that’s enough.
I think a limerick might be easier
There once was a lady called Spain
Who had rages again and again.
When others misgendered
Pronouns she’d tendered,
She wanted to cause them pain.
Not very good, but it’ll do for now. Work to do!
Applause for Tim Harris.
And a ” Get over yourself, lad!” for Mr. Spain.
I was taught as a child to feel unreasonable anger towards non-Catholics for perfectly normal behaviour which didn’t happen to conform to the rules of the RCC. I’m quite sure that the Online Church of the Pronoun People is teaching its adherents the same attitude.
Another thing just struck me about the incident: how very much the Starbucks staff conformed to expected sex roles, with the man coming to the (aggressive and unnecessary) defence of a female colleague to defend her honour, just like a knight of old.
Everyone, including the Starbucks staff, knows what sex they are; the Starbucks staff want to live in a fantasy, like toddlers often do, and this is why they explode when anyone reminds them of reality. They have the emotional maturity of two-year-olds. Getting tantrummed at by toddlers for stepping out of the role of Dragon or Princess they’ve assigned me in a fantasy game they’re playing is an acceptable (although swiftly corrected) behaviour; and explaining that no, even if they believe that they are tigers, they must put on their pyjamas and go to sleep and can’t go hunting, is a normal (if tedious) part of raising children.
Yes, and NOT AT ALL a normal part of interacting with adult strangers!!!
[…] Tim Harris is our poet laureate. […]
Happy to have never been in a Starbucks ever. Very happy to keep it that way. (The list of companies I won’t have dealings with – Uber, McDonald’s, Amazon, etc – just keeps growing but somehow I cope /sarcasm.)
I realize it’s beside the point, but one thing that bugs me about this is the fact that there are shops out there that don’t accept cash as payment. I mostly pay by card myself these days, but not everyone can or wants to. Why should such people be forced to forego their double mocha vanilla oat milk venti frappe? At the very least, one of the employees or another customer could’ve taken her money and put it on their card and spared everyone the drama.
I do find the Starbucks ‘won’t take cash’ attitude odd, since a lot of other places are starting to charge a surcharge for using your card. Cash doesn’t cost the company extra to accept; cards do.
I suspect it’s to prevent employees from pilfering. If they have so much pilfering from the register that they’d rather pay the card charge, they might want to consider paying their employees more. Though if their employees routinely act like Mr. Spain, I can see why they might not want to pay more.
By the way, tigger, Online Church of the Pronoun People is great! I’m going to remember that. (It would make a great play title, if you would permit.)
Not much comment about him stalking out to the sidewalk and assaulting the person filming the incident. That’s grounds for arrest right there.
The not accepting cash aspect annoys me too. I didn’t even know that was a thing. (I’m way too cheap to spend multiple dollars for a hit of coffee.)
I’d never heard of a Starbucks doing this (though I rarely go into Starbucks), but there’s a local vegetarian fast food chain that does it in some of its locations.
Since when did it become a right to not be offended? The other day I was strolling down the sidewalk on my way to pick up a sandwich for lunch, and an obviously high pair of women nearby* started laughing at me and saying “you’re bald! Hey baldy! Hey!”. Yeah, it pissed me off, but I just kept on walking. So what if they were annoying? I had no right to attack them or be violent. I had every right to just move along, which I did. You know, I’m kinda fat, too. Just a little. And I’ve got a gray beard. They could have shouted “hey fat old baldy!” at me, and the situation would have been the same. You know what else I didn’t do? I didn’t call them a pair of wasted drug addicts. I didn’t speak to them at all. I didn’t even look at them. I ignored them and got on with my life. (The sandwich was delicious, by the way.)
*My city, sadly, has a bad and increasingly worse problem with homeless drug users downtown.
Yours too, huh? Seattle is absolutely godawful.
@iknklast – on business accounts there is a cash deposit fee, because banks do have increased costs for handling cash and even if not, managing cash does have increased risk for the business (including employee theft.) Businesses save money cards-only, and no longer need to make bank runs. The swipe fee is made up for by automatic transfers from their merchant service provider.
Also, customers spend more on impulse buys with cards than if they carry cash.
James Garnett #17
What?
You didn’t get a pair of she bears to maul them?
Plus the employees do better because of the preset tip percentages. If I can afford a frappuccino I can afford to tip.
As for the parents, George Carlin was right. These days, every child is “special”. We have raised a generation of participation trophy winners.
Jim Barry: He is not a Special Prophet of Gawd with magicpowers.
Of course you may use the phrase in any way you please, iknklast. I would be honoured!
I suspect there is some cost for cash. They need to keep cash on hand for change, and they need actual cash registers to hold it, rather than just those portable electronic doodads that are so popular these days, and they need to deposit the cash somewhere, requiring both a physical bank and a trip to the bank. Maybe some of these are not insurmountable, but I do think there are practical reasons, beyond not trusting employees, for choosing not to accept cash.
… which is of course what Mike Haubrich said, if I had only read the replies a little quicker. Oops.
Let this be a lesson to all, Sackbut.
Thanks for making these points about cash vs card – I’d been persuaded a little while ago that cash is better, by a longer version of the point in 12: if I spend £30 in cash and it goes through several more hands it’s still £30, but if I spend £30 on my card, by the time it goes through several more hands the bank has most of it. However, subsequent comments here have pointed out that there are actual cost savings at least for larger organisations/corporations that must make up for the loss of fees to the bank. I think in principle I’d prefer any losses to go to actual people doing additional work, as salary, than to the banks, but obviously that’s not my decision. So I’m back to being unsure now whether cash or card is best.
From the merchant’s perspective, going cashless may make sense, although there are merchants who don’t accept cards, or who give discounts if you pay in cash, for various reasons. But I was thinking of this more from the perspective of the customer, who in my opinion has a reasonable expectation that a coffee shop would accept payment in cash. And keep in mind that it’s the poorest who are least likely to have a credit or debit card (not saying that this woman is poor, just that a cashless policy tends to discriminate against the poor).