People watching from the other side of the counter, based on my experience
What Your Barista Really Thinks About You
Thank you for smiling — you just made their day
Clink! Clink! Clink! The customer dropped coins in our tips jar as though we’d won the jackpot on a fruit machine. He wore a pressed white shirt and chinos, like James Bond taking a day off.
No matter how many coins he dropped in, they kept coming.
“Can you change these coins for a $10 bill?” he asked, holding out more coins in his palm. His voice had an Irish lilt, plus the gravitas of someone who knows what life’s about.
“I can’t open the cash register,” I said. I called my boss and explained what the customer wanted. We were on the evening shift, evenings at the mall were quiet. There were only a couple of other customers at tables, drinking coffee. Unlike most other times of the day, where we’d decline this request unless the customer bought a coffee, helping someone out with their change on the evening shift was no problem.
“Sure,” my boss said. My boss was a friendly guy, always happy to help. Especially to a suave James Bond customer giving excess tips.
Clink! Clink! Clink! The tips continued.
“Oh you know what,” the James Bond customer said after my boss had counted the change. “Let’s round it up to $20.”
He handed my boss an extra $10.
“Sure,” my boss said, handing him a $20 bill.
The James Bond guy walked off, swinging his umbrella on his arm.
I looked in the tips jar. “That’s weird,” I said. “It sounded like he gave us so much.” There were just a few pennies in there. They were all pennies.
My boss looked pensive. “Something wasn’t right about that,” he said. “When I cash up this evening, we’re going to be short of money.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” my boss said. “But I think we’ve just been scammed.”
Yep, we’d been scammed
When we counted up the cash register, we were $10 short. “We were scammed,” my boss said.
I couldn’t work out what had happened. Math was my top class at school, but it didn’t make sense. My boss explained: “When he gave us the extra $10, that was the $10 I’d just given him.”
“And..?” I asked.
It took me a while to puzzle it out. We’d fallen foul of the Change Raising scam. As the Wikipedia entry explains:
“Change raising, also known as a quick-change artist, is a common short con and involves an offer to change an amount of money with someone, while at the same time taking change or bills back and forth to confuse the person as to how much money is actually being changed.”
Since the coffee shop was a small business, taking around $700 per day in revenue, the scammer had reduced our day’s income by 1.5% — not a small amount.
What I thought about my customers while working as a barista
I worked as a barista over a period of 4 years, from 2003–2006. It was one of my first real jobs, and I loved it.
When I’m buying a drink in a coffee shop, I often wonder what servers think of me. Maybe it’s an empathy thing. I want to enter other people’s worlds, understand from their point of view.
So I thought it would be fun to share some of the thoughts I had about customers.
I loved the customers in our coffee shop. All of them. The rich ones, the scruffy ones, the ones who always tipped, the ones who never tipped. The moms and dads who brought their young kids. The elderly woman who wanted eight brown sugars to stir into her coffee.
I wanted to sit down with them, ask them about their lives, their hopes their dreams. I didn’t want to only serve them coffee. I wanted to be their therapist, their confidant. That’s what I dreamed working in a coffee shop would be like. I thought I’d have endless time, I thought it would be a people-focused job.
I never smoked in my life, so I was especially fascinated by customers who smoked. I wanted to ask the smokers — this was at a time when it was still legal to smoke inside here in the UK — what secrets they learned from their cigarettes. They always looked so satisfied when they lit up.
I’m perpetually curious, I always want to know more.
Customers are loveable humans
Here’s the thing, though:
If you’re not running a scam — and you’re not a daily customer — then your barista will most likely never think of you again.
It’s not a people job, not really. It’s a cups and hot liquid job. You’re on a production line, and it’s up to you to serve as much coffee and cake as possible, as quickly as possible.
It’s not like the movies where you can just chat away to customers, have fun with them, get to know them. The most you can ask is “How are you?” and even then you’re not really listening — you’re listening to the orders coming in from other cash registers, so you can pre-empt who will be going to what coffee machine. We had a maximum output of coffee, and at busy times you didn’t want to be the server to cause a massive hold-up to a customer who’s ordered a single coffee while you fulfilled a bulk order.
Being a barista is not a job where you can slack off. You’re always on. Even when it’s quiet, there’s the cleaning to catch up on, or stock inventory to do. It was rare that we’d have the time to fall victim to a scam artist.
If the barista thinks of you at all, it’s probably in one of the following ways:
- What book are you reading there? I really want to know!
- How did you two meet? You look like such good friends.
- Where do you find the time to sit and dream with a coffee — I want your life!
- I can’t believe you’ve got this much money to spend on coffee. That’s two hours of my wages you just spent on lunch.
- Please don’t buy the last baguette. If it’s still there at the end of the day, I get to take it home for dinner.
- Hello decaff-mocha-with-no-cream guy! I always remember your order because no one else orders it.
- You are amazing. I love your humanity. Thank you for buying a coffee here.
Want to make a barista’s day? Here’s the best thing you can do. Give them a smile, and ask how their day is going. They might just give a brisk “great, thank you,” because that’s all they’ve got time to say, but they’ll be grateful you asked.
And when they bring your coffee — warm, fresh, and delicious — smile again and say “thank you!” Even though they’re unlikely to think of you again, you’ll linger in their emotional memory, because you made their day brighter.
Now, enjoy your coffee!
This post is part of my Pixar Storytelling Challenge:
