Parrothead Ramblings

Don Vito Corleone would have been proud of these guys.

The Fetching Mrs Crime Dog suggested last night that we get out of the house for a while and run over to the local Starbucks for some coffee and conversation. I'm no big fan of nine dollar coffee, but I needed a little diversion and jumped at the chance. We got over there, and I found they have a frozen concoction called a "frappucino." It sounds like something your Italian neighbor would call you after your dog takes a shit in his yard, but it looked good. So I ordered a medium.

Oops! Coffee foul! First warning to Crime Dog!

What I wanted was not a medium, but a grande. Wait a damn minute now, I'm from the southwest, and I happen to know that grande means large, not medium. This caffeine pimp was hustling (otherwise known as upselling) me. Of course, I learned what any seasoned Starbucks vet already knew: they don't have "small, medium, and large." They have "tall, grande, and venti." Allow me to translate:

Small = Tall = Expensive
Medium = Large = Very expensive
Large = Twenty = Second mortgage

Oh sure, that makes sense. So, whip me up a grande frappucino, there, Skippy, and hold the caffeine. I gotta sleep sometime tonight. I wanted to drink it slowly, because I realized I could actually calculate the cost of one of these things in "dollars per minute." I gotta keep that ratio down, or else I feel like the easy mark in a game of three-card monty.

What's this? I can't suck anything through my straw. Figuring it to be defective, I select another, shoot the wrapper at the Fetching Mrs Crime Dog, plunge it into the icy depths, and get down to business. No good. Still can't get anything through the straw. Must be my technique. By observing the highly-trained frozen-coffee aficionados around me for a few minutes, I quickly learned the "stir and poke" technique. It's the only way to get that shit loose enough to travel up a straw without a popping a vein in your head and talking out the corner of your mouth for the rest of your life.

As I was poking and stirring, I felt a sizeable hard mass in the bottom of my drink. It was an ice cube. Skippy obviously turned off the blender too soon. "Hey Skippy," I asked, holding the cube aloft, "where did THIS come from?"

Skippy looks at it and says, "Oh, we get our ice at Fry's." Dude clearly has no grasp of the concept of sarcasm. Ah, whet the hell, it's just an ice cube. I popped it in my mouth to get the seventy-eight cents' worth of coffee off it, and pitched it in the trash.

That's when it hit me: I got scammed!

What if every frappucino Starbucks sells has an ice cube in it? I figure the cube was about one cubic inch. A 12-ounce drink is only filled with maybe 10 ounces, or 18 cubic inches, of tasty beverage. So 10% of your frappucino is devoted to a chunk of frozen water. Your $3.50 drink has a thirty-five cent ice cube in it. If these con artists sell just 100,000 frappucinos nationwide tomorrow, they'll clear a cool $35,000.

So I stole their sugar shaker and a shitload of napkins. Bastards.
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