Hasta La Creative!

A few weeks back I spotted a jpeg on image-sharing site Imgur with the caption “Told the barista my name was ‘Bryan, with a y.’ This is what I got back.” It showed a Starbucks cup with a hastily scrawled “Briany” on it. Ha! When I shared the image on Twitter, I heard back from plenty of folks who also thought it was funny — and were eager to share their own tales of Starbucks name-mangling. I just checked the stats on that image and it’s been viewed 489,502 times as of this writing.

Coincidentally, around the same time I happened to publish a post on AdAge.com with a video embed of a “Saturday Night Live” commercial parody that also focused on Starbucks name-mangling — within the larger context of Starbucks-employee incompetence. The faux spot was for the Starbucks Verismo home-brewing system and it showed a nice lady patiently trying to use her machine in her kitchen, only to have it botch her order and refer to her as “Amorfa” (instead of “Marsha”). My post about the commercial parody dominated AdAge.com’s Most Read chart for a couple of days and has been one of the most-viewed things on our site so far in 2013.

This is comforting to me, because it suggests that my unhealthy obsession with Starbucks is a common condition. I mean, obviously plenty of people are obsessed with Starbucks — people talk all the time about needing their “Starbucks fix” — and of course it’s normal to think a lot about drugs (like caffeine) before, during and after using them. But I’m not a big coffee drinker, and I actually rarely go to Starbucks (I’m not a fan of their roasts), which makes my obsession perhaps particularly unhealthy. You see, my fixation on the chain has more to do with Starbucks as a sort of inescapable, free-floating meme by virtue of its omnipresence in our lives and its unique status as the no-rent headquarters of millions of laptop-toting media-makers across the land.

Continue reading at AdAge.com