I swear to god if I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to make a Tik Tok drink, take an order that had a Tik Tok drink, or listen in on a customer ordering one, I’d be fucking rich.

Also, don’t think you didn’t see this post coming, you damn know well it was.

Hi, if you didn’t know already I’m a Starbucks barista and have been for two years now, so it’s my duty as a barista to vocalize my opinion on this.

Coming from a barista’s pov, I think that Tik Tok 1000% ruined the Starbucks experience. I’ve actually had this conversation with some of my coworkers about this and some actually agree. Of course, every barista is different so not everyone will share the same or similar views; some actually really love the trend of viral Starbucks drinks.

But I’ll be completely honest with you, I really don’t like making them.

Now this blog post isn’t just to roast you if you’ve ever fed into by far my least favourite, sugar-driven recipes from an app. This post also exists to guide you and give you some insight into some things about Starbucks you may not have known before (or weren’t paying attention to).

I’ve noticed that for some reason Tik Tok has a strong infatuation with the following:

• Adding vanilla sweet cream/vanilla sweet cream cold foam/salted cream cold foam to anything and everything under the sun (and I mean literally EVERYTHING)
• Adding white mocha syrup to a drink or getting a white mocha based drink
• Adding chai syrup to a drink or getting a chai based drink and then adding one (most times all) of the options listed
• Two words: Caramel. Drizzle…most times cali style.

Aight, I’m going to keep this part extremely short and sweet:

1. Vanilla sweet cream in its usual form, cold foam form, or salted cold foam form does not need to be put with everything. I promise you it doesn’t make a drink better or worse, it just tastes like you topped it with melted vanilla ice cream. Every order I make has at least one or two drinks with vanilla sweet cream in them. Some of them goes as far as adding a scoop of matcha, vanilla bean, or strawberry puree (which I find a bit strange, but go off)
2. Easy on the caramel drizzle and white mocha. The amount of sugar in drinks like that easily makes the drink pretty undrinkable. And if it’s a coffee-based drink, you dilute the coffee which eliminates a good chunk of the drink altogether. Which is saying something because I’ve had a sweet tooth my whole life.
3. Why? Just why? Like I get it, Tik Tok is cool and some of the drinks on there seem pretty tasty (I can admit to finding a few that I get here and there). But most of the drinks that I see are crazy, unnecessary, and if it has a lot of customizations, anxiety-inducing.

Some other things you may not have realized or taken into account at Starbucks before:

1. The secret menu doesn’t exist. I’m talking about the Oreo, Cotton Candy, and Cinnamon Roll frappuccinos and more. All of those drinks use one of our existing menu drinks as a base, but have a mound of customizations and added ingredients that would give itself a name and turn itself into a secret menu item. If you’re ordering a secret menu drink, don’t order it by the name and assume we know exactly what you’re talking about because again, it doesn’t exist. Instead, pull up the ingredient list of the drink on your phone and tell us all the ingredients that make up the drink that you want. It saves so much time.
2. Always start your order with the drink size and whether it’s hot or iced. I cannot stress this enough how important this first step in ordering is. It helps a lot knowing what the size of your drink will be and whether it’s hot or iced first, so that your barista doesn’t have to circle back to it at the end of your order (especially if you’ve ordered more than one).
3. Baristas aren’t above making mistakes (and we’ll make a lot of them). If we fuck up something in your drink or make it wrong (which is an inevitable part of the job even though we really try to make every drink right), it’s not the end of the world. Don’t be too angry about it because every barista handles situations like that differently. I know for sure I do. Customer service jobs don’t get enough credit for some of the crazy things that we deal with in order to make sure people are satisfied. But remember, we are human and we feel things that exact same way as you. Treat your baristas with kindness.
4. Remember, we’re a pandemic right now so think: do you really need to cave into your Starbucks craving? For the last year, my human interaction has been with my coworkers and the people in my household. I haven’t gone anywhere else and I haven’t seen anyone else. If I go as far as the grocery store to grab a few things, my anxiety and comfort levels spike to a crazy amount because I’m now some place I’m not used to being. My routine is going to work and coming home from it. I was shocked when the pandemic started and the opposite of what I expected happened. Instead of business being slow, it got incredibly busy and on some days, to amounts where the job wasn’t enjoyable and it was taking a serious toll on my mental health; there were so many times where I thought: “is it worth it?” We love seeing you and serving you but remember that in a crisis like this, there’s so much risk on the table not just for you, but for us too. I get it, there’s really nowhere else to go. But it really is in your best interest to stay home and just abide by the rules of the lockdown. Your favourite refresher or frappuccino can wait a bit, can’t it?
5. *Bonus: At a drive thru location? There’s multiple people wearing headsets (and we can all hear you). Aside from the drive thru order taker, there’s a few other baristas wearing headsets on the floor at the same time. Which means we can ALL hear you when you order and even sometimes after (if you car is still on the DT sensor). Just a heads up.

ED out x.

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Listen to: deja vu // Olivia Rodrigo