Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Image is in the details.

The logo is a siren. Mistake?

Not being a coffee drinker, I was confused by the sizes at a Starbucks recently. Fortunately, they provide handy examples up front, from which I deduced the following translations:

Tall normally means something is bigger than its peers, but in this case tall means small. Customers ordering a tall are freed from feeling like they are depriving themselves.

Grande
means large. Instead of feeling guilty about indulging, customers can take a caffeinated vacation south of the border. Arriba!

Venti means Supersize. We have learned though from our forebears in the 1990's that Supersize will kill you. So Starbucks had to rename it. Venti is Italian for 20, as in the number of ounces in the drink, or the square root of the caffeine dose.

It's great ideas like these that helped Starbucks open a new location every workday in the 1990's.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot Short - it's eight ounces, so half the size of Grande. :)

Unknown said...

Hai Neek!
I have dropped off the face of the planet, but I still love you and miss you.
Whatcha up to?
Plz respond via email. I was just too lazy to go back to my gmail interface and write you after checking your blog. :)

... someday our kids will have something way cooler than blogs and they will laugh at us when we use the term. It'll be like our parents telling us about buying records.

mhesvh