【Café Cultures】
We all love to visit cafes (not corporate chained ones, e.g. Starbucks), to get that energy and spiritual lift from freshly brewed coffee. As more coffee addict grows, a subculture is developed, for better or for worse. For baristas, there is nothing more annoying than a difficult customer, which they encounter quite often. Even as a customer myself, I noticed a lot of pet peeves customers carry when they visit a café. The following are some of things you should and should not do at a café, to ensure you are not one of the difficult customers baristas complaint about.
1. Understand the basic terminology of coffee. If not, listen. This may seem like a shock to you, but there is actually a lot of customers who do not even know what espresso is!!! Other lesser known drinks include Piccolo and Dirty. Granted that you really do not know what it is, you can always ask the barista for guidance, and follow the instruction of how to consume that coffee accordingly and not do the opposite.
2. Avoid asking for an extra hot coffee (or order an iced coffee and ask for no ice). A lot of cafes, especially specialty ones, have excellent coffee beans for espresso-based drinks or hand drip coffee. If water or milk is heated to an undesirable temperature, the end result will be affected, and the coffee will lose its flavours. If what you desire is simply that dose of caffeine and does not aim for that beauty in coffee, please be my guest and visit a corporate chained cafe.
3. Do not sit for hours and only order one drink. A lot of customers, including myself, like to work or study at a café, and that’s ok, but what you should not do is only order one drink, and occupy a seat for hours. Cafes earn money (or maintain survival) through guest turnover, it is incredibly rude to enjoy all the complementary (e.g. wifi, AC, services) the café provides and take advantage of it. The benchmark I usually uses, is to order a drink every 1.5 hours if I were to stay for a long time.
4. Taking photos for wayyyyy too long. Like myself, I like to take pictures of the cup of coffee whenever I try new cafes. There is nothing wrong with it, sharing it in social media also helps increasing the café’s presence, influencers and foodies do that all the time. However, if it takes you 5 to 10 min to take pictures of the coffee or yourself whilst not touching the drink itself, please do not complain why the taste of the coffee changed or why it is not hot enough. Ask yourself, are you here for the photo or for the coffee?
5. Be patient. Especially at busy hours or when the cafe is at its full capacity, baristas might not be able to delivery your order swiftly. Understand that all they want to do is to provide a quality drink for you and rushing them won’t help.
6. Do not put your uncontained mask on the dining table. In times of pandemic, for your health and others, please be considerate and correctly store your mask while enjoying that beverage.
7. Customers are not always right.