A Love Letter to Starbucks

Dear Starbucks,

Billion-dollar corporate chain, my absolute life and livelihood, I miss you with the intensity of a barista on her third shot of morning espresso. I love your $5 coffees and your $6 roasted tomato and mozzarella paninis, at which I shamelessly throw all my money as if you were a fountain at an amusement park. But, alas, love has no price! 

I love your $5 matcha lattes, which stain my mouth a fluorescent green, and your $4 iced coffees, which are really just ice with a side of coffee. I love how your cafe lights never get brighter than twilight and your background music is always blasting some aggressively millennial Olivia Rodrigo wannabe. I love the way your baristas make direct eye contact with me as if they know my deepest desires, and yet they still manage to misspell my name in an almost inconceivable variety of ways (how exactly does ‘Hailey’ become ‘Hayleigh’?). 

But, more than anything, I love how you’ve always been there for me—on wakeless mornings and sleepless nights, and on days when even the sun refuses to emerge from its blanket of clouds. You’ve always been everywhere I go (and quite literally, too. You’re at every corner. I could travel to the middle of a desert and still find you conveniently located less than a mile away, stalking me like some spurned love interest in a non-threatening 80s rom-com). 

The Silverlake charm of hip, independent coffee shops compete for my affection with handcrafted artisan roast coffee in tiny 8-oz cups like roses from The Bachelor. However, none could blend a caffeinated concoction of sugar and ice and call it coffee quite like you. Those other hipster cafes with their bulky, chalk-covered menus promising sustainability through artisanal organic coffee beans hand-picked by a small and loving family of four in some exotic South American country can’t compare. As I succumb to the pressure of supporting a Small Independent Business, I always come back to you, Starbucks, my caffeine-induced addiction. My fluency in your language of coffees (grande iced white mocha?) spares me the awkward stuttering that comes with trying to pronounce the different flavor blends of those other shops (what really is an Ambrosia Coffee of God, anyway?). 

All this is to say, Starbucks, you keep me sprightly and wakeful. Unlike your syrups and straws, my love for you won’t ever go out of stock. And although my love is more than enough to sustain this relationship, I don’t mind the reciprocation through BOGO Thursdays and monthly double-point offers.

All my love (and money),

Hailey