As you know, dear reader, I had wrapped up my badass drifter wastrel years and gone clean.
It was 1998 and I helped build and paint the first Starbucks in New Zealand.
I thought it was some super boutique thing. I was too dumb and hick to realize that my actions were allowing this disgusting corporate giant its first foothold into the great Green Land of NZ.
I was pretty amazed by the machines and the fact that there were actually DIFFERENT TYPES of coffees!
Coffee was not just a high-powered dust from a tin or a plunger full of blackness.??!!
This was 99 NZ and Coffee Culture wasn’t fully a thing yet.
We were still mostly on the tea and the instant, and I think it would have been better if we just stayed there.
Instant coffee is for beasts of legend…
My relationship with coffee goes back to when I was 14.
I discovered that If I had a heaped tablespoon of instant coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk and one piece of marmite toast for breakfast, I could super survive the day at school and pay really good attention as well as fully thrash it out in the skateboard area at lunchtime and then play berserker level rugby in the afternoon.
Me at 14, skateboard area. Wheels worn down to nothin. No kick left from endless ollies.
That board is a Danny Way.
Rural NZ school. Lobes a humming. I’m probably screaming something like “Mega GNARLY!!”.
Learning our slang from Thrasher Magazine and skate videos. Fringe like a boss.
OK… so the Starbucks I was painting in Auckland….at 22 years old…
There was a good-looking blond gal running the place who had been sent over to SEATTLE to the original Pike Place to learn all about Coffee!
A NZ gal… sent over to AMERICA. The AMERICA FROM THE TV.
This blew my mind too...and I convinced her to meet me for an outing.
Yet alas the powerful coffee fumes shielded her from my amorous advances and after our one PG AF date - she explained that I was just "too intense for her"...
My rebuttal was that she was sholud be able to handle it as she was SELLING COFFEE !! The actual distilled ESSENSE of intense. To which she replied...
" These sort of conversations is exactly what I mean - and now that you are starting to get really into Starbucks you’re just going to become more nuts, and I saw you going through the bin outside the shop….what the fuck are you doing?”
FUCK! Caught.
Well why was I going through bins…?
Well I had thought:
“Man, It’d be cool to have hundreds of paper coffee cups so I could always drink from a paper coffee cup and never have to drink from heavy, cold, and uncomfortably wide-mouthed porcelain cups again.”
Then the very NEXT DAY…
I happened into possession of two plastic-wrapped towers of 100 Starbucks cups. The cups were in the Starbucks dumpster as the outer plastic bags they were in were slightly damaged. I live and die by the Dumpster as you long-time readers know…
Yet I needed lids. The cups really are not any good without lids.
The lid seals the cylindrical structure that is the coffee cup and keeps the heat of the fluid within its protective paper shielding. On leaving a painting job which was near the Starbucks I had built and painted I spied many many lids ( on their single-use cups ) in a trash can outside the Starbucks…
A strange almost inexplicable superhero-like transformation took place and almost instantaneously I was The Post Grunge Drifter once more. I became focused on the bounty of the much-needed lids within the garbage receptacle. I hunched my shoulders put my hoody hood up and reactivated “The Shield .” The Shield is a powerful force screen that deflects all and every degrading comment or horrified look from anyone who sees you rummaging in a dumpster for food- or in this case a garbage bin for lids in a bin outside the window of a Starbucks. The shield was a bit dusty having not been used ( to the credit of my increased attention to my own financial planning ) since the great Dumpster Feeds Summer of 1997 but to my joy was still fully operational.
Not unlike a bear fishing for salmon on the rocky shore of a river in the wilderness of British Columbia, my hand shot into the bin liberating ten good lids within seconds. I stashed them in my hoody pocket and jogged off, deactivating the shield as I went.
( This Gal must have seen me just after I deactivated the shield!)
So I had lids, Cups and …
The Starbucks packed up the grounds and put them in a barrel by the door for COMPOST!
I had grabbed 4 big sacks of this. Taking it home I would put about two cups of this black gold in to a saucepan and boil it up good.
Pouring the filthy black brew into a thermos, I would take it to work and secretly fill my Starbucks cup with it.
So it looked like I was drinking Starbucks from the cool new place all damn day long.
And Technicaly I was.
I had it all. Cups, Lids and The Starbucks Coffee.
Mates would say: “Your gunna go fucking broke drinking that pricey Starbucks shit all day mate!”
HA ! I had them all fooled.
I started to really like the feel of the smooth and warm, lidded cardboard cylinder in my hand. I really liked drinking through the tiny hole in the top of the lid which seemed to me to be created by some sort of Super Genius to deliver the exact amount of liquid at the exact speed needed to imbibe the hot and healing fluid in a safe and efficient fashion.
Also the healing power of 25,000 leeched micro plastics per cup.
Due to the fact that I was re-using it over and over - I was literaly drinking the plastic waterproofing as they degraded… this is the source of my magic powers…
It was a good life.
It was the best. Fully putting it to the man and getting Free Coffee!
TAKE THAT STARBUCKS! I BEAT YOU.
Fighting the system like a true modern-day robin hood right?
Decades later I went to Pike Place in Seattle.
I took this photo.
I strode in like a commanding God, and told them all about how I built that first Starbucks in NZ.
This was Mid-Hipster times, and they did not seem interested at all in Crazy looking Kiwis excitedly telling storys…
I got an eyebrow raise and a half nod…
So be it…
So I just rolled out… but now you have heard my Tale and know that in all the broad universe there is one guy that Beat Starbucks.
Or you cant hook me up - Restack your favorite story of mine :) With Why :)
So someone else can hook me up :)
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I used to short circuit the baristas by ordering in the wrong order. Not because they were baristas, I was a barista in Seattle in the early 90s. It's just how I order, and I bucked their programming by refusing to retain the correct order they relayed it back to me in. Your way was cheaper! <3
Hard to get any coffee with 3am starts logging mate, French press, make me own at home and fill the thermos when I was down there.
Maybe get some instant at the mill down Kawerau or Lakeside Timber in Taupo.
I used to short circuit the baristas by ordering in the wrong order. Not because they were baristas, I was a barista in Seattle in the early 90s. It's just how I order, and I bucked their programming by refusing to retain the correct order they relayed it back to me in. Your way was cheaper! <3