Coffee. I drink that. At least this time I did. Today (and by today I mean a week ago) marked one of the first steps of my journey to Costa Rica; our first pre-departure meeting at Starbucks!!
So, we met at the newest Starbucks in Oakland, the one on 5th Avenue. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty noisy in there for the first hour or so, but I was still eager to get down to the nitty gritty of things. Upon entering, all participants were graciously offered a gift card to get a drink from Starbucks. YAY! I myself just went with a "small" Vanilla Bean Frappe after forgetting what I initially had wanted to order.
The first part of the meeting was mostly logistics. Professor Teeter gave a short presentation based on the syllabus, going over some tidbits of Costa Rica. One neat thing I did get to do was meet my group mates and find out what our topics focus was. Roast of Team 5, that's our name. Do you see what we did there? Back to the important business. My group's topic of focus will be Land & People. It deals with the geography and history of Costa Rica.
On to the second part of the meeting, we got to meet the Starbucks Manager, Robyn! She even offered us free samples of the Carmelized Frappe at the end, quite nice of her. During our meeting with Robyn, I discovered a lot goes into running a fully functional coffee shop. Of course, at this Starbucks, 95% of the customers are students. Occasionally, Robyn noted, there can be an unhappy customer or two. Usually situations like these, Robyn notes "the customer is always right", and sometimes they'll be given a $4 gift card to make up for their experience. She also mentioned that Starbucks is known for it's enthusiasm, so she tries to keep everyone with the best attitudes possible. After 90 minutes employees usually get a break, because that is usually when they begin to mess up. I applaud individuals who work at coffee shops. Robyn told us that they usually make 500 drinks a day, their late mornings and afternoons being the busiest.
Our first meeting was so unique, and definitely a cool experience!
Well, until tomorrow I suppose!
