Friday, April 3, 2015

Overheard: VIP's talking Smoothies

I'm at it again

 
 
I'm at the Starbucks in the hospital lobby during R's weekly wheelchair Pilates class.

Ten minutes ago, a group of people, five women and two men, flocked in. They pulled four little tables together, stole chairs from all over, and started a big, important meeting right next to me. Crap. I might as well put on my Intrepid Eavesdropper persona because this teeny little coffee shop only has these few tables; there is nowhere else for me to go. Besides, they took all the chairs.
 

Clearly, these people are VIP's from Starbucks. (The company is based in Seattle; my friend years ago was a nanny for Howard Schultz...) The execs are discussing their new product, just released a couple of days ago: smoothies! Oh, they are so excited! The barista has just delivered a tiny plastic cup of each flavor to each VIP and I hear:

"The customer doesn't know what we have unless they SEE it."

"500 a week. That's being conservative."

"A year. We could send that...we could expand that...a pretty good estimate."

"They could request blueberries."

...And so on.

Anyway, I'm going to try to tune them out and go back to my writing. "Try" is the operative word here...
 


I rather wish they'd offered me four tiny plastic cups of smoothies too.