Starbucks, where the food is free and the stupid costs extra

As most denizens of the Green Apron Palace (hey, that's pretty catchy, if too many syllables) knows, baristas start "marking out" the old sandwiches, pastries and cookies around a half-hour before closing time. Play nice with the baristas, and you might score some day-old pastry.

I once made off with a two sacks full of sandwiches and pastries, probably about $60 worth total, just because I was in the right place at the right time. The shift supervisor told me that the people from the local homeless shelter just never came by, so they wound up just throwing the food away. Better to at least give it to the customers, who will be eating it, than letting it rot in a landfill. Plus, I recycled the plastic packaging.

Anywhoodle.

I'm sitting there, drinking my third coffee of the night when this hood rat rolls in about 9:30 p.m. Please note that this particular Starbucks doesn't technically close until 11 p.m., although the place is as dead as Linsay Lohan's career and the baristas are in full cleaning mode. And what is this about LiLo doing a "tastefully raunchy" spread for MUSE magazine? NSFW WARNING!

HoodRat is in full white-boy wannabe "gangsta" mode. He probably never saw the inside of a rap CD cover, much less the inside of a crack house. The closest he ever got to Detroit was watching Eminem's "8 Mile" on DVD; he probably listens to Taylor Swift in the bedroom and croons into his hairbrush. His pants are too low and I'm not positive that those weren't little hearts on his boxers.

"Yo man, do ya'll still be giving out the free food after dark?" I don't know what language he thought he was speaking, but it only bore a passing acquaintance to English. Note that "after dark" is around 6 p.m. local time here what with the stupidity of the time change.

Speak CO-REK-LEE (I have to break it down in case you can't handle words of three syllables) people. You wonder why people treat you like you're ignorant? It is because you *sound* ignorant. 

The barista, who is a skinny white boy with too-long hair that is starting to do that weird sixties flip at the ends, when everyone just abandoned scissors in favor of free love and mop-tops. Still cute, mind you, but he's starting to look like a Monkee. Which really doesn't go with the earrings he's wearing. Sorry. Lost my train of thought. Think Davy Jones with big silver barbells in his ears. Yeah. I know. Odd combination. It is 2009. Anything goes.

Davy Jones Barista nails the HoodRat with a stare that would drop a rampaging bull elephant at a thousand pace and goes, in this haughty tone of voice that would do a British heiress proud, "We really don't do that any more." If only he had said it in an English accent, I might have been smitten by Britain on the spot. It was more a flat Midwestern thing. Plus, he's probably too young for me. Sixteen with get you twenty, you know.

As he's doing this, Davy Jones Barista is stacking up sandwiches by the register to mark them out. He calmly continues this task, then moves on to the pastry. He has zero intention of offering the HoodRat free anything, not even a sample of Starbucks Via, which they apparently can't even give away. *snark*




Face-to-face with the failure of his brilliant plan to score a free sandwich, the HoodRat didn't know what to do. The brain cells (all two of them) were smoking (weed, that is).

I wanted to laugh. I really did. This is why the gene pool needs a good chlorine bleach every week or so. The stupidity needs to be scrubbed out before it breeds.

HoodRat flares, like he's going to make an issue out of it, and I'm thinking, well, this could be a first. I'm going to witness a throwdown over a piece of crumb cake and a couple of those soggy egg salad sandwiches. Which, if I was the barista, I'd have given him - because NO ONE buys them. NO ONE. Every single Starbucks in town has those awful faux-egg concoctions left over at closing.



HoodRat winds up leaving. Apparently egg salad isn't worth it. Truthfully, it isn't.

Trust me on this one, I know. I've been there at closing time at the four busiest stores in the county - and every single one of them is marking out egg salad sandwiches every night. It must be made out of people.