a girl, a guy, a tomato, a bean, and a bear

Friday, November 6, 2009

When you say medium, do you mean small or large?

We have the amazing fortune to have a drive thru Starbucks here in town. We also have another little cafe style restaurant (similar to, although not quite as good as Panera) called Atlanta Bread Comapny. Well, when we were first settling in and without our cooking supplies, we frequented both of these establishments a bit more than...well, we'll just say 'normal' and leave it at that.

I've heard comedians do routines about Starbucks and their tall, grande, and venti versions of the standard small, medium, and large sizes. Personally I've never had a hard time keeping them straight, but low and behold, at Atlanta Bread their small is called short, their medium is called tall and their large is called grande. Okay, now this actually probably makes more sense than the system at Starbucks, but in reality what it does is get you a larger size than you intended. You go in wanting a small, order a tall out of habit and suddenly you have a medium. Confused yet? Wait for this...

So one day at the Chick-fil-a drive thru window a few weeks back while I was sick, I wanted a chocolate shake. The voice from the box asked what size I wanted. "Small, please," I replied, but then added, "well, what size is your small?" You know how different places have different size cups sometimes, right? This was her response:

"Oh, it's a small size cup."

Brilliant. Very informative and helpful. Being sick and guessing that was as good an answer as I was going to get, I just went with the mystery sized small and moved on.

Now today I was back at Chick-fil-a again (please, no judging...), this time to get the seasonally offered peppermint chocolate chip shake (oh. yes.) When I asked for a medium (I'm judging myself) the girl came back over the box and said that they only come in large or small. Really? Okay. She proceeds to follow that statement up with, "But the large comes in the medium size cup, so do you want that?" I was so confused that I just said "yes" and got a milkshake the size of a small cat.

So to sum up, small is either short or tall, medium is non-existent, tall or grande, and large is one of three: venti, grande, or a small cat.

4 comments:

Jenn aka Gillybear said...

I am SO going to call corporate and suggest we create an additional size called "small cat." But in order to stay in the theme of the other names, we might have to call it something like "chat petit(e?)". Which would bring another source of amusement to the names of Starbucks sizes: listening to southerners attempting to pronounce it.

Great blog, friend!!

screamy mimi said...

Hahaha! That would be hilarious. I can only imagine as a barista how many variations on the names you must hear. I know I've heard plenty of amusing ones just from standing in line. Love it!

Write Softly said...

So. Perfectly. Awesome.

And really? Peppermint chocolate shake? I might run some red lights on the way there.

Miss you guys! And thinking of you A LOT lately. So shaken by the stuff going down at Fort Hood -- and so thankful that you were nowhere near.

Kyla said...

I order and hope for the best...we're never going to figure it all out. LOL!

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