I told her I wanted “the middle size which is smaller than the largest and larger than the smallest.” She said “oh my gosh, you want a grande” which sounded larger than the medium which I ordered. Then I asked her what the sizes were in the planet called Starbucks. She said the largest size is a Venti and the next smaller size is a Grande; the smallest size is a Tall. A tall. That’s like saying here are my three brothers: Giuseppe, Filipe and Tom. What gives them the right to change the sizes anyway? It’s like me changing the colors on a traffic light to mauve, taupe and blue or making the American flag fuchsia and chartreuse stripes on a field of gold. Nobody questions this and we order our coffee in a new language with a smirk as if the people asking for a medium, rather than a grande, may someday learn to walk upright.
I researched it and venti means twenty in Italian which I guess is appropriate as it takes me twenty minutes to order my morning coffee. Grande is an effort to make a medium coffee sound so much bigger than it really is. I didn’t understand why it was called a grande until it was time to pay and I had to take out a personal loan because there wasn't enough room on my credit card for a Starbucks coffee. Which brings me to tall which rhymes with small. I think the creativity train had sailed when it came time to name it.
The girl serving me my grande is not a server or a coffee person; she is a Barista which comes from the Italian for bartender. After having to learn the metric system or the tantric system or whatever the system for ordering coffee is called, I could have used a drink but this Barista had no alcohol on tap. It probably would have been cheaper if she had gotten me a Heineken instead. It’s confusing enough that beer comes in pints, soda in liters, milk in gallons and water in ounces; that took me twenty years to master that and now I need an Italian/English dictionary to get my morning coffee.
They might have changed it as a result of this column but for a while, McDonalds had done away with the small sodas. One time, I ordered a small and the kid behind the counter in the paper hat told me they no longer had a small. The sizes were medium, large and extra large. It might have just been that McDonald’s although I know that the corporation keeps those franchises more tightly wound than a German hausfraus’ bun. But this zit factory, at least for the day, was forcing me to change what I knew about drink sizes. Common sense says that medium means middle so in order to have a middle, there needs to be a size smaller and larger than it. When someone asks me my shirt size, I don’t say venti. And even if Starbucks did start making t-shirts, would a small really be called a tall? It has less chance of flying than a toilet with wings.
I’m going to start making up my own rules and the Starbucks people and everyone else are going to have to follow. I figure that using a Brady Bunch theme for ordering coffee makes just as much sense as ordering in Italian. From now on, every time I go into a Starbucks and I order a Peter, they must make me a medium coffee and not ask me what size a Peter is. If I want a large, it’s a Greg and they give me a small when I say Bobby. For girls, the sizes are Cindy, Jan and Marcia. I may try to confuse them by asking for two Jan’s and a Greg with a dab of Alice. And a Marcia Caffe latte espresso macchiato will hit the spot on a cold morning.
