The Devil Drinks Starbucks

No one knew who placed the order. But there it was, waiting to be grabbed as it dangled from the printer that was spitting out a parade of drink stickers at the new Starbucks on Pacific Coast Highway.

It was an understatement to say that the Cambria coffee shop had brought controversy. This was an idyllic city by the sea that preferred to be a magnet for rare cat breeds and wicker furniture and used books. But Cambria’s need for more tax revenue drowned out the native’s cries, and Starbucks store #9815 opened on a foggy day in November.

While purists shunned the grand opening, the temptation of an Iced Ube Coconut Espresso or a Mango Lemonade Strawberry Energy Refresher couldn’t keep the masses away, and by 9am the drive-thru was filled with a steady stream of cars while the inside line was populated by kid-free moms with time to kill and middle-aged men on the way to the golf course and a Marxist sewing club that had already commandeered the brand new leather couch.

The Starbucks staff, for their part, was in the zone, grabbing stickers and slapping them on their matching drinks, riding high with a fresh sense of purpose in a town full of people whose greatest ambition was the timing of their afternoon nap. And so it was delightfully disruptive when a pale, pencil-shaped twenty-two-year-old barista grabbed the sticker for the venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappucino and called out without any hesitation:

“I HAVE AN ORDER FOR SATAN.”

There were two seconds of silence after she yelled it, followed by laughter that stretched out for minutes. The team needed a chuckle after a pressure-packed morning, and they waited to see who they could thank for giving it to them. But no one stepped forward to claim Beelzebub’s beverage, and the red-faced barista placed it on the pick-up counter shelf as a wave of fresh orders pulled her back to the task at hand.

An hour later and the devil’s drink was still there, his once pert whipped cream now collapsing into the brown, chip-filled sludge. It was just a prank, they concluded, forgetting all about it until the late morning rush when the barista looked over and saw that Satan had indeed emerged from the shadows and taken his $7.35 milkshake with him.

It didn’t take long for word about the store’s famous customer to spread through the sleepy, pine-treed town, and within a week a Yelp review deemed that this was not in fact Cambria’s Starbucks… but Satan’s. The Gen Z staff embraced the notion. In a boring place like Cambria, this pedigree gave them the rare opportunity to feel rebellious and hip.

Leaning into the fun, a handful of employees began a morning tradition of starting their shifts by putting their hands over their hearts and saying “All hail, King Satan.” The afternoon shift added devil horns to their name tags. Instead of a traditional Christmas party, on the night of the winter solstice, the manager invited the whole staff to come back after closing and partake in a “black mass” in Satan’s honor, spreading out Frappuccino cups in the shape of a pentagram on the cold cement floor while lighting candles and calling on his mysterious “mocha cookie crumble” powers to deliver dark chocolate blessings on everyone in the new year.

Now some of you may be expecting that this is when all hell broke loose. But that’s not the way Satan operates and this time was no different. In fact, from the staff’s perspective, their little store on Pacific Coast Highway chugged along like any other non-satanic place of business, tackling a variety of issues that could at worst be called a nuisance.

There was that quirky round table near the door that wobbled, of course, and a few times a day a worker was on his hands and knees with folded up paper napkins trying to make it level. And there were struggles with lost deliveries, which made sense given the fact that Cambria was on the way to nowhere in particular. And also there was the rotten meat smell. Not everyone smelled it, but the place had been a butcher shop before Starbucks came in so the odor made sense. The store manager looked in the storage closets and crawl spaces and even cleaned out the fridge multiple times, but never succeeding in eliminating it.

All things considered, it was nothing to lose sleep over.

But that was still early in the year, before they started having issues with the microphone in the drive-thru. Because of their proximity to the nearby fire station, their receiver was picking up incoming calls from the emergency dispatch line while the fire house received their coffee orders. So instead of taking an order for a tall French roast and a mocha latte, employees were asked to respond to a “small child bitten by squirrel” and a “large woman with chest pains.” The mix-up led to dropped orders which slowed down business and pushed the drive-thru line all the way out onto PCH, and as traffic piled up, the Highway Patrol arrived, full of threats to take legal action if the coffee shop couldn’t figure out how to protect its customers from fisherman flying past their customers’ side mirrors at 60 mph on their way down to Morro Bay.

And all that honking and swerving eventually scared away the commie sewing club and the carefree golfers and the childless moms, which made the staff realize that the once joyful Cambria Starbucks had evolved into a fairly miserable place to work.

This newfound misery was timed perfectly with the arrival of flu season and a nasty bug spread from worker to worker and then from the staff to its customers, hollowing out the store and leaving behind a cranky, skeleton crew of coughing and feverish employees. Not surprisingly, they soon started to turn on each other. A shift supervisor called a barista “ugly as an egg bite” and the barista called the shift supervisor a “grande vanilla ho bag” and everyone openly nicknamed the manager “The Origin Of The Stink,” and with spring still a month away, store #9815 was burning through employees in a town that didn’t have many motivated applicants to choose from.

This is when the big boys in Seattle got involved. Starbucks headquarters had been watching the day over day numbers for weeks, wondering what was going on in Cambria. The store had launched in the top 10% of their Central California locations but was steadily dropping, now running well below average, and given the amount corporate had poured into building permits and lobbying the city for approval, “well below average” was not acceptable.

Thankfully, they had a solution for this sort of thing. His name was Austin Shield, a slick, 30-something graduate of the Harvard Business School who specialized in saving dying Starbucks locations. Austin was paid handsomely as evidenced by his tailored jeans and Gucci loafers. In the four years he’d been with corporate, he had a perfect record of resurrections. It didn’t matter if the Starbucks was in midtown Manhattan or at a food court in Bismarck, North Dakota, Austin had the gift to see beyond the numbers and find the deeper issues. The longest it ever took him to diagnose and save a store was five days. His record turnaround was three hours.

Austin arrived in Cambria a little irked. Alaska Airlines, where he had proudly ascended to the Atmos Titanium tier on their frequent flier scale, could only deliver him as close as San Jose or Santa Barbara, both of which necessitated a minimum two-hour drive once he landed. He also couldn’t earn any Marriott Bonvoy points for the trip since every hotel in Cambria was privately owned or a cutesy bed and breakfast.

Rather than get upset, Austin remembered his business school training and channeled his frustration into the task at hand: fixing store #9815. At 7am on Day 1, he was sitting down with the store manager and peppering her with questions:

• What is the biggest thing currently killing your sales?

• What are the 3 biggest bottlenecks in drink delivery?

• On a scale of 1 to 10, what is employee morale and why?

• If you could change one thing about this store right now, what would it be?

• Also, what is that smell?

He did the same with the shift supervisors and baristas, then spent an hour polling random customers about their experience in exchange for $5 gift cards.

“I have all I need,” he declared before retreating to his bed and breakfast to draft an action plan.

Austin fired the store manager, one of the shift supervisors, and three baristas. He made a corporate donation to the first responder’s union in exchange for them agreeing to switch their dispatch calls to a different radio channel. He hired a professional carpenter to level out the wobbly table. He redirected all deliveries to the San Luis Obispo Starbucks then paid an employee with a pickup truck five hundred extra bucks a week to drive everything to the Cambria store three times a week. He sponsored a local influencer to record a TikTok reel announcing the store was under new management with free drip coffees for the first 200 customers. Last but not least, Austin bought a four-pack of Glade PlugIns air fresheners at the local drug store and installed them himself.

Austin told corporate he would stay onsite a day or two to help as things improved. He was confident that he would be back in Seattle by the weekend.

When he pulled in the next morning at 8am, the first thing he saw was a customer puking in the bushes. He went inside and was hit with a putrid wave of something so horrific that it nearly made him turn right around and join the customer at the shrub. But he knew he had to be strong. For the team. For corporate. And for every alumni of the Harvard Business School. Breathing only through his mouth, Austin assured the grim staff that the smell did not pose a work hazard as he quickly directed foot traffic toward the drive-thru line and put on a headset to help take orders.

But as he flipped on the sound, he was dismayed to hear that instead of picking up the emergency dispatch feed, the Cambria Starbucks was now picking up nanny cam sounds from Happy Clappy, a bustling daycare center down the street. Clear as day, a chorus of sad children were wailing and saying various versions of “I want Mommy.”

This created a problem since Meg, the brand new store manager, had just dropped off her youngest son at Happy Clappy and swore that one of those cries was “my Benji.” Austin had never met Benji, but assured his mother that her child was no doubt happy and clappy. Meg did not buy it and announced that she was quitting.

“You can’t do that,” said Austin.

“Why not?” said Meg.

“Because Starbucks needs you,” he said.

Meg did not find this argument persuasive. She stormed toward the exit but Austin grabbed her arm before she made it out the door.

“LET GO OF ME!” Meg yelled.

As she screamed, a highway patrolman was entering with a court order to shut down the drive-thru. Seeing the terrified look in Meg’s eyes, the officer pulled her to safety, and Austin stumbled backwards, hitting the sturdy, non-wobbly table with his hip then spinning headfirst into the hard wooden lip of the beverage pick-up counter.

He slumped to the ground underneath it. A drop of blood dripped from the gash on his forehead and stained his tailored jeans. A single Gucci loafer had come to rest near the bakery display case.

“What the hell is wrong with this place…” Austin moaned.

In the doorway, the highway patrolman called for a paramedic.

It’s gonna be okay, Austin assured himself. Just stay awake till they get here. Everything will be just fine.

A few seconds later, in the earpiece of the drive-thru headset, Austin heard the unfortunate voice of the emergency dispatcher:

…we have a 30-something male with a head wound and possible concussion. Any available unit, please respond…

“Oh no,” Austin realized. He signaled to his headset but the highway patrolman didn’t understand, thinking he was pointing to his cut.

“Yep, they’re coming,” the officer said, unwilling to step inside because of the toxic smell.

“No…” Austin whispered, barely audible.

…any available unit, please respond…

Austin lifted his head, desperate to keep his eyes open. That’s when he saw it.

…any available unit, please respond…

It was an old drink sticker. A venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino, to be specific. Stuck to the bottom side of the pick-up counter.

…any available unit, please respond…

It was left behind by a customer who, in retrospect, had never truly left at all.

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