Last Day For Free Tea Lattes (And Weather So Bad They Broke Out The Boats In The Streets)

Today's weather was crazy. It rained so hard that it was so flooded on the main streets that sandwich the Mall my store's in that people were literally going through the streets in boats! Guys were charging 20 bucks per head to ferry people in a dinky little boat through waist-high water.

The creek beside the highway and the national railway pretty much overflowed with the floodwaters. Manholes were also gushing water from the sewers, and as much as possible, nobody really wanted to go through all that filth (hello cholera). The end result was pretty much people stranded, and traffic stuck up to the side streets that don't normally get used by anyone.

Oh hey, look, a crappy video!



I just decided to go back to the Coffee Bean and log in a little overtime. Hey, if I'm gonna wait for the flood waters to go down, might as well earn a couple more bucks, right?

Well, most of the other baristas were stuck as well. By evening, there were six baristas and 3 managers, and not enough work to go around. Except for the ENB station, which was once again overrun with Tea Latte orders.

We were already doing everything we could to help the two guys manning the station, like restocking powders, cups, lids, and prepping all the paper cups and sleeves and making sure milk was quickly available for steaming; but tea lattes would be queued up all the way to a waiting list of up to 30 orders! These were pretty much all free tea lattes, coupons from a promo we've been doing. Today was the last day, and as expected, it was the most insane. Hordes of people crammed into the store, ordering lattes by the eights and tens, and it was incredibly hard to keep things going fast, even as we assignd another group head to tea lattes to speed up preparation.

That was pretty much it. We were up to our heads in tea latte orders, but barely anyone was ordering any Ice Blended drinks or gourmet dishes.

And seriously, what is wrong with these people getting free lattes? I mean, not only are they getting a free, great-tasting drink, but they can also see that we're being overwhelmed (as well as being informed of it) despite our best efforts, and some of these guys still have the gall to complain about "Waiting for so long" and crap like that. We're going as fast as we can, and we're also trying to be as nice as we can.

FREE DRINK. LONG LINE. WE INFORMED YOU BEFORE YOU ORDERED. YOU SAID OKAY. SO WAIT AND BE NICE.