Starbucks revisited

After recent posts about supporting independent shops and, particularly, coffee shops, you might justifiably wonder what I'm doing inside a Starbucks franchise. Well, it was for nostalgia: let me explain.

Between June 1991, just after Charlie was born, and October 2004, I worked as an IT contractor. The only time I was out of work during all those years was in December 1999 and January 2000. That was a tense time. The whole business of dealing with the Millennium Bug meant that there wasn't much happening in the world of IT. During those few weeks, I ran up a bill of £400 with BT, obsessively connecting to Jobserve using my dial-up modem.

Finally, though, I managed to get on a project in Glasgow, working for JPMorgan. It turned out to be a great project and I'm still in touch with four of the of the people I worked with, three of whom I've met up with in the last couple of months. 

On one of my first days there, if not the first day, I had a meeting with the project manager, Davey. When I went over to his desk, he suggested we head out to Starbucks. From 2015, it's hard to convey just how exciting and novel a proposition this was. Thus - on work time! - we left the building and strolled up to Bothwell Street, where this Starbucks is located.

Now, I still remember, ten years prior to this, the first time I encountered a cafetière. I was in a café on the Albert Dock with my first wife and my friend Bob. We sat there looking at this device for a while, wondering when and whether to push down the plunger. This now, though, in Starbucks, was a whole different proposition with a new language of lattes, cappuccinos, mochas and espressos. Even the cup sizes required a little deductive thought.

So, as I was in Glasgow today for a meeting - just over the road from the JPMorgan offices, in fact - I decided to temporarily turn a blind eye to Starbucks' corporate misdemeanours and pop in for a latte, just for old times' sake.