Coffee on the run took on new meaning for a local Starbucks when a thief ran off with the store’s drive-through speaker box.
The speaker box – stolen sometime after midnight Sunday and early Monday from the cafe on Douglas Street across from Mayfair Shopping Center – was dismantled, and its insides stolen, leaving stranded customers in a caffeine valley.
Reacting in typical corporate fashion to the crisis of inconvenience, Starbucks Coffee, rather than lever java drinkers out of their idling vehicles, sent servers, armed with headsets and blanket – outdoors to take orders in person.
Barista Peter Gatt, 19, did his eight-hour shift on Thursday, repeating orders through his headset to staff inside.
“It’s been really, really awful,” Gatt said. “It’s a pain with the rain, even with the umbrella.”
In the day of no request being too small or big, customers ordered the usual array of coffees, to caramel macchiatos to extra-hot half-caf no-fat no-foam lattes with cinnamon.
Begging the question folks – Is it too much to ask to get your big fat tush out of your polluting car into a cafe for 7 minutes?