Blahgorrhea

I found out two nights ago that the smallest size at Starbucks is in fact not the tall, but that it is still the short. In an effort to pump more caffeine into Americans, they took the short off the menu, made the tall the smallest available menu size and added an enormous 20 ounce venti as the large. Considering how annoying the whole changing of sizes from small/medium/large (Domino’s is another terrible perpetrator of this pattern), I was very pleased to learn that I could still get a normal size cup of coffee. All this has happened since having become a huge Peet’s fan when there was a Peet’s store across from work. Now there is no Peet’s, and the local coffee shop has bad coffee, so I go to Starbucks. I had become used to the 10 ounce small that Peet’s has and was thrown off by the extra two ounces I receive in a Starbucks tall. Ordering a short gets me back into normal coffee drink size range, but it is only eight ounces. Now that is a 10-cent (and two ounce) dilemma.

On the walk back home through the Tenderloin I was approached by a woman who was in dire need of some spare change. As I walked toward her, she made a quick change in direction to bring us face-to-face, at which point she delivered her marketing message: “White boy, do you have any spare change? I need to get some…”. With her misguided plea of “white boy,” I was totally thrown off. Maybe a quick lesson in addressing your audience would do her some good.

I have a 4-year-old cell phone. It still works (my theory on why it still works is that it does not have non-cell-phone features that get in the way of the quality of the phone itself, but that is a post for another time), but it is loosing steam, having more and more problems keeping a signal. So I figured I would look into getting a new phone. [Continue reading…]

CitiBank has a great ad campaign going right now. They have billboards posted all over San Francisco with pithy sayings about how money isn’t the most important thing in life. While I enjoy reading the billboards, and while they do make me reflect (for oh so brief of a moment as I fight my way through stupid drivers and even more stupid pedestrians) on how life really shouldn’t be about money, I can’t help but wonder whether the company at the top of Forbes magazine’s Global 2000 list, a company with $1.4 trillion in assets, can really believe that money isn’t everything. Money is their entire business.