The Jeff R Project

Anybody who knows me even a bit knows I’ve got a Starbucks addiction, but I’m trying to kick it.

In Downtown Vancouver, there is a Starbucks location within a few (read 2) blocks of just about everywhere. In the last 3 places I/We have lived, there’s been one within a block. And there is one within a block of my office.

Seriously, I didn’t plan it, but I think Starbucks did.

A few years ago I went to Yuma, Arizona for Christmas to visit my dad and step-mother and was tired most of the time I was there. I came up with my Starbucks Conspiracy Theory. Basically, the reason I was tired wasn’t that I wasn’t drinking coffee but rather, in Vancouver the air is so saturated with caffeine from one coffee shop or another (Starbucks, Blendz, Cafe D’Artigiano, etc) that you live in an artificially caffeinated state whether you like it or not.

So, this past weekend Starbucks finally released a store locator app for the iPhone into the Canadian iTunes store!

For me, it’s not about locating a store in Vancouver, it’s about remembering which stores are good (clean bathrooms, friendly staff) among the 100s there seem to be downtown.

And of course it will come in handy when we’re out of our comfort zone and I need a fix.

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Ok, I’m going to rag on the lowly clerks who work at retail stores, so if that offends you, please feel free to stop reading.

But I’m not going to blame them entirely.

Yesterday, I went to buy some shoes. I was feeling kinda crappy anyway, having one of those days where everything annoyed me and probably didn’t want to be there. So my dear husband and I ventured to a store downtown known for inexpensive sports shoes (note, this is not Payless!! They sell crap I won’t even touch much less pay for) to find me a simple pair of running shoes.

We enter the store and head for the shoe wall. We passed 3 employees without a single on of them making eye contact. We perused the shoe wall for about 5 minutes trying to find something I liked and finally found a pair. There was a bored looking girl leaning against the pillar about 5 feet away so Chris asked her for a size 10 in this style. She made eye contact with him, but as I watched, she actually rolled her eyes, looked bored, whispered something and wandered off.

Chris headed off to look at shorts or t-shirts while I waited in the shoe department, looking at other options in case these didn’t work out. A minute later, I notice she’s holding up the wall again. I assumed (wrongly) that someone else (taller?) was finding the shoes for her. I sat and waited. After about 5 minutes, I headed off to find Chris as I was tired of waiting. As he comes back to me, she says – “there are no 10s” to him. So I said “How come you didn’t tell me that, I was sitting there waiting for you to bring me the shoes” and things went down hill from there.

The girl in charge of the till asked us to leave. I said “Don’t you care that your employee doesn’t know how to do her job?” She told us to fill out a card to send to head office and told us we weren’t welcome back in the store. Huh?

There’s a Starbucks near us who has a pretty good staff overall. But there’s one guy who is almost never on the bar. He’s always on cash. Even then, he seems pretty stunned most of the time. I have no doubt that being a barista is harder than some jobs. Remembering how to make so many drinks and having customers customize them to within an inch of their names is tough.

I don’t know why they keep this guy on staff. He barely handles orders at the till and often needs them repeated. After going there regularly, the baristas know my order before I get to the till but he doesn’t usually get it when I tell it to him. Slow…ly.

Excellent customer service is hard, takes the right mindset, presence and thoughfulness. I understand this as I have been doing varying forms of customer service for 25 years, since my first paper route. I really appreciate the staff who really get it, own it and excel at it. My expectations are not that high. I honestly don’t expect the guy at Starbucks to remember my order. I expect him to get it right when I give it to him. If he wants to excel, he’ll remember it.

These days, whether because of high turn over, lazy management (I put the blame here), staff who have never had really good customer service to model from, low wages or whatever, your general retail experience in downtown Vancouver is less than stellar, and on the decline.

If you’ve had either great or crappy customer service experience, let me know. I want to shop at the good places.

I ended up buying shoes at Costco. Sadly, low expectations of service there and I’m never disappointed.

Playing “Where’s Jeff?” in Vancouver could be a fun game, but I don’t think enough people know me to spot me. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t have a striped red shirt and jaunty toque like some people, so that may make me harder to spot in a crowd.

Although I still have the ’70s porn star moustache thing going on so that may make it a little easier.

Today, on the last day of my vacation, I had intended to get out and do some sightseeing or touring or something but instead got several emergency emails from work and ended up going in for 3 hours. Yup. Check out the dedication! I spent the whole time I was there solving a series of problems, which in general were of my own making. But also due to a lack of foresight and testing. Sucked.

I left work at 2:30, got home, had some lunch, walked the dog, played with the dog, then headed downtown to meet Chris. Chris had to go to the doctor for his broken ass leg problem again. More drugs, more tests, more pain. Poor guy.

So I hung out at the Starbucks in Chapters for a while trying to accomplish some of my work for the day. It was loud and noisy and hot. Apparently men swarm in about 10 minutes before I got there and form a series of impromptu chess tournaments. It was kind of interesting. Some 20-somethings playing chess against what could be their grandfathers. Quite a range. Seems like speed chess since the matches didn’t last very long.

I met Chris in front of Vancouver Optical where I had perused their latest series of displays. They always have such interesting windows. I usually like their October ones best, when they get a bunch of props from horror movies made for local productions. A little gruesome, but fun!

Now I’m hanging out at the Starbucks at Helmcken and Howe across the street from the doctors office. Chris is in getting his bursitis checked and fixed, I hope. Turns out he’s not alone. Another friend also has bursitis and has been off work for quite some time because she can’t sit for that long (Hi Jessica). That’s gotta suck.

When Chris is done, I’m hoping for a long-ish but leisurely wander home. I need some downtime before we hit the couch for the night. And undoubtedly the dog will pounce on us the minute we get home.

See, that game of “Where’s Jeff?” would have totally sucked. Outside of home, I’ve been in the same 5 blocks all day.

I’ve been on a mini-vacation this week (3 days) which is nowhere near enough, but better than nothing. Mostly I’ve been doing maintenance on a few websites, playing with the dog a lot, a few minor domestic chores and generally doing sweet f*** all. It’s great. I could get used to it.

Today is day 2 and I decided to take it on the road. Chris and I bought a laptop about 2 months ago (on credit card, 3 months no interest, already paid off thank you very much) and it’s never left the house.

That’s not quite true. I took it to Metrotown on Good Friday to meet Chris but we didn’t go anywhere to sit that I could pull it out and use it, so it stayed in the bag. I consider that “not going out”.

Today, I finished most of my self-imposed chores at home and took the dog on a good hike. The sun was out the whole time, some puppy friends were out and he had a good time. Then I decided to head downtown. I had to drop some checks off for the orthodontist and since it was nice, I decided to relax outside the house for a while.

I considered where I could go, and settled on the close and familiar Starbucks inside Chapters downtown.  Not very exotic or interesting, but I knew my Chapters card would get me some free wi-fi and I could have a little coffee. Having never done it on this laptop before (only on my iPod), I assumed it would be easy. WRONG.

According to the Bell WiFi Hotspot site, their connection/setup isn’t compatible with FireFox, my browser of choice. So I fired up IE. It worked “better” but the connection screen kept refreshing and never gave me the “You have 2 hours” message. In fact, it even yelled at me once saying I had tried to connect too many times before the connection was ready and I should “Stop it. Now!” – yes, it actually said exactly that.

I finally opened a new tab to my home page and it worked. I guess the connection was established but the Java applet they use wasn’t compatible with this 64-bit version of Vista. 20 minutes wasted.

So here I am, sitting in the middle of Starbucks, surrounded by a lot of people (it was empty when I arrived) and writing this blog post. Fun. I’ve been tweeting, checking email and generally trying to look busy, productive and somewhat less pretentious than most people I usually see, but guess what!

Using your laptop while sitting in Starbucks with a giant coffee cup (full of mystery fluid, or empty) looks pretentious. No matter what.

Stop me? Not bloody likely! I love being able to do this. The freedom is pretty cool. I should activate my webcam and take a picture. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

There you go! Now I have to leave. Not only do I want to get home before Chris, but 2 women just sat down RIGHT NEXT TO ME. They pulled 2 empty chair and just sat down. No table, no nothing. It makes me uncomfortable.

Aw crap. It’s raining. Thank god for the Sears viaduct to the Skytrain. Minimal wetness.

Thanks for reading…

If you frequent Starbucks, or really any place that sells HOT to-go beverages, you’ve probably experienced “the geyser” as I call it.

You’ve got your $8.00 140 degree cinnamon chai tea misto latte double espresso, dressed it with raw sugar, whole milk and a sprinkle of chocolate powder, put the lid on and you’re ready to go. On the way out the door, your toe hits the kick plate and you jostle the drink a little bit, but you’ve got it under control.

Here comes “the geyser.” Just a little bit of your hot drink spurts out the drink-hole (which sounds dirty) and drops directly onto the web of your hand scalding you, pissing you off and causing you to drop said $8 .00 drink, cursing and swearing.

Well, Starbucks now has a way to prevent that. They started showing up in Vancouver late last year, and they may not be as new as I think. One exuberant barista called it “The greatest invention since Post-It Notes” which I may not entirely agree with, but they are great.

What is it called? I have no idea, but it’s basically a swizzle stick with a plug on the end. Or is it like a miniature pacifier with an extended stick? With a bit of research it seems to be called a “splash stick” and was introduced like a year ago as a result of feedback on the Starbucks social networking/customer service site called My Starbucks Idea.

I’ve got to say I LOVE these little sticks. I don’t know if they rival Post-It’s or some of the other brilliant inventions, but I do like the idea they came from an online community suggestion. I also REALLY love that they keep the rain out of my coffee as I trudge back to the office or condo with my coffee in my now-safe-from-burning hand.