Infinite Credit: The Americano Dream
I work at [Coffee Chain] as a part-timer while attending college. One day, during the summer, a young woman walks in with her friends.
Each friend orders and pays for a really specific drink. When the main girl comes up to the counter, it is clear this is her first time at one of our locations, so I talk her through everything and take her through what each item is.
She nods and orders something that she thinks she might like.
When all the drinks come out, she tries it, looks disgusted, and puts it down before coming back to the counter. I ask her if something was wrong, but she politely says no, explaining that this was one of her first run-ins with coffee and that she had expected the drink to “taste like thick Christmas,” which I do not understand, especially being that it is summer so all of our minty drinks have cycled out.
She orders another drink, once again opting for the largest size, and when it comes out, this process repeats.
She orders drink after drink after drink, going down our menu and politely declining my recommendation to get smaller sizes. Her friends go from finding this hilarious to finding it concerning as their small table starts to pile with drinks.
Eventually, she has gone through about fifteen menu items like this, one of her friends is literally running back and forth between the table and finding random people on the street to give these drinks to. (She is telling them they have been sampled, but this is pre-[health crisis] so not a lot of them care.)
On about her twentieth order, I stop her as I have been keeping a running tab of the charges on my calculator.
Me: “Ma’am, you’re about to run into $80.”
Friend: “[Customer], if you don’t like coffee, that’s fine. You don’t need… We don’t care. You’re buying so much.”
The young woman waves us both off.
Customer: “Don’t worry; it’s Dad’s card. He won’t mind.”
She continued to order until she triggered the card security, and the bank shut the card off.
She called her father to get it turned on again and that conversation did not go well; I could hear him yelling clearly on my side.
When she put down the phone, she cleared her throat, timidly approached the counter, and asked me if we were hiring.
Two weeks later, she began training.
She found out that she likes our teas.
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