Pay It Forward - Starbuck's Style

As much as I might disdain Starbuck’s, pretty cool story out of Washington State. Apparently one woman bought the drink of the person behind her. This person then bought the next person’s, etc, until over 1,000 people repeated it, many of them making additional donations to a Starbuck’s charity. Very cool and one of the things I like about this time of year.

Just a couple of things, though… The Starbuck’s is so busy that a continuous string of one thousand people came in? Wow, that’s a busy little store… I feel bad for the employees. I can’t imagine serving 1,000 consecutive patrons with no break in between. How long must this have gone on? Which brings me to my next point. It ended at 6:20 in the morning. They’d already served a thousand people before 6:30? Holy crap… Assuming each person’s order took 15 seconds (an unreasonably short time estimate) that’s still 4 hours. Are there really big Starbuck’s out on the West Coast? All the ones I’ve seen are small and I can’t imagine it taking less than a minute to serve each person, meaning this would have gone on since about 2 in the afternoon yesterday. Are Starbuck’s open 24 hours a day?

Who’s the curmudgeon that ended this thing? A chain of 1,000 people must have generated quite a buzz. I’m sure people were talking about it, etc. Who’s gonna walk in, find out their drink is free, find out this has been going on for many hours, and not continue it? Surely such a person is worthy of Scrooge’s (pre-visitation) highest respect. Bah! Humbug!

Semi-related Movie Plug: If you haven’t seen Pay it Forward, please, check it out. It really is one of the most moving movies I’ve ever seen and it’s a great reminder that we can make a difference.