This is going to be the first in a series of utterly petty gripes; issues that I freely concede are not worth getting angry about, let alone cause to start on the protest marches and petitions. I’m probably the only one that thinks this way on many of these issues, but what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t rant irrationally?
Coffee orders
I don’t drink coffee. I think it smells and tastes disgusting. But I recognise that other people do like coffee, and are perfectly entitled to drink it.
However, when all I want is a bottle of water or a chocolate bar, I don’t want to have to stand in line for five minutes behind someone who has ordered a coffee.
It always seems to happen – especially when I’m in a rush. They order the coffee, and then the person taking the order goes through the laborious process of making it. Any other customers are completely ignored until it is done.
Different approach to serving food
This doesn’t happen with anything else that takes so long to make. Order food, and they pass the order to the kitchen then get on with serving the next customer.
Please, cafés, adopt a similar system with the coffee drinkers. Have one person taking orders, and one person making coffees. That way everyone can get served promptly and you reduce the size of the queue. Simple, huh?
Alternatively, make the coffee drinkers wait in a separate line. I’m not generally a fan of back-of-the-bus style segregation, but here I’ll make an exception.
I usually have coffee at an Italian place, where they have a coffee machine similar to a steam organ, and only one person who knows how to use it.
So, he makes coffee full-time, and the waitresses take your order, and bring it to you when it’s ready.
But having someone to take the orders and someone else to make the coffee amounts to bloated, inefficient business practice, weighed down by ridiculously flabby and wasteful pouring of vital resources into absurdly laborious…
(In other words, it makes sense to the customer – and the employee – but not the management. Guess whose interests win out?)
Ah, but it starts to make sense to management if customers stop using the place because they have to wait so bloody long to buy a bottle of water. Or at least I hope so, anyway.
I am glad I am not the only one who comes across this ‘problem’.
When I buy a drink in the cafe of my local supermarket, I always seem to get stuck behind someone who’s ordered 3 capuccinos/lattes or whatever they are called. And it takes forever.