Trendy Corporate Coffee

Trendy Corporate Coffee

We’ve all visited at least one of these places.

It’s not that it’s all overpriced garbage…it’s the way people look when they’re there. Corporate bookstores are the same. The average person goes there and thinks they’re so smart but all they really are is trendy idiots. Everyone looks so…pretentious. Their noses up in the air. Arms around their trophy girlfriends/boyfriends. There’s at least 2 interracial couples resetting the social standards. Everyone thinks they’re blending in with the college crowd but colleges are full of assholes. You pay 7 bucks for a tiny cup of soup and all the sudden you are a genius. It’s not some upper-class bullshit either. You’re in a building next to a cellphone store and a pizza joint. You take advantage of the free wi-fi and people-watch for a while, but you’re not much more than a fucking asshole. These are the places that refuse to hire people with body mods, yet you are a fucking intellectual for going there?

It’s a cool April day and there really isn’t much to do. You don’t want to waste gas driving around aimlessly listening to Metalcore. You drank yourself drunk last night and it’s only 4:40pm. You drive up and down the main road and it’s all the same shit. Corporate pharmacies, gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants. The real intellectuals are stowed away in their home libraries. You’re just some bored asshole hoping to meet eyes with anyone that knows what the fuck is really going on. Instead, everyone looks ready to join a reality show. Even the elderly people have $70 hairstyles and high-fashion corporate department store clothes. Everyone has become their internet personality profile ego. No one stands out.

It’s all hustle and bustle and the will to look good while doing so. Everyone is doing their best to look beautiful or handsome. The middle aged people dress like the teens and the teens dress like sluts. We’re quarantined in teenage mindsets and cultural hotbeds. These places are the new paradigm of where to go to absorb what society is becoming…as long as you believe that society is becoming dumber by the second. When you first walk in, the first impression is one of drastic smartitude. A few minutes into it, you see the look in people’s eyes that screams the dumbest shit ever and you wonder if drinking again is really a bad idea. This is why people smoke pot. This is why people have kids. You walk thru the department store and the only people worth looking at are people you want to fuck. Sexual attraction isn’t much more than a weakness these days…narcissists are everywhere. Kids…usually babies…are the real heroes. Society’s little tabula rasas ready to be informed and inspired. You know they aren’t some corporate sellout or some dickhead like yourself buying into the hype.

You slurp your coffee and it’s far from communal. Unless you come to these places with someone, you don’t talk to anyone. If you see someone interesting, the moment you see them texting you write them off as too busy. Small talk be damned if they’re on a laptop. Half the customers are on their lunch breaks so they’re busily eating their bagels or whatever. It’s the big city atmosphere in a bullshit town. High schoolers so fucking cool you want to punch them for talking. The smell of cinnamon fills the air but the flavor isn’t anywhere near as good. If you are lucky, you can stomach about an hour of any given place. If you have to, you can put up with more but only if you have some earbuds in. Your Mp3 player is your savior. It’s the only thing that can block out the stupidity of it all. Maybe you have some reading glasses that are too strong to see anything clearly but the screen or page in front of you.

Concentration is almost impossible. Most people…even most geniuses…can’t block it all out. You try to be Zen. You try to relax but there’s something really, really unsettling about society these days. You look across the road and there’s an organic foods store. Ah…fucking dicks. We all hate the teenager that goes vegan one day and is a prick about it the next, but society has gone green in such a way that you thank your lucky stars over and over you don’t carry a machete. Uppity fuckers. Everyone has this Hollywood mindset where we forget that luxury costs. Doing the right thing is opined as the best thing to do, but doing what you can is all you can do. The internet is littered with stories of the rich getting richer. More and more, society is losing sight of what it means to be a normal person. There’s nothing you can do but go along with it. You’re stuck where you are for the time being, so adaptation is key.

Arguments of right and wrong are everywhere but no one really worries about doing the nice thing. Our religions keep us moral but morality makes us mean. We’re feral when it comes to sex and politics…and politics covers almost everything except philosophy. We adapt, but maturation is the stupidest idea ever. Everything is geared toward the horny teens and college kids with disposable income. The tv ads all boast their intellectual superiority because they can alter sexually explicit ideas just enough to make it passed the censors. Anyone with half a brain is pondering when this shit will run its course but it’s been decades. We hide behind matted black and white photography but we aren’t an arty culture at all. Art is nostalgic at best. It’s a style…it’s what interior designers learn in college. Any bullshit photo is fantastic in the right context.

We’ve all learned how to do 2 things: 1. Sentimentally value bullshit and 2. Be a cynical fuck. You can blame shitty parenting, bad teachers, idiotic politicians, bad diets, and whatever you want…but we suck. It’s a Cock-Rock marathon day in day out interrupted by a few gang-banger tunes mixed with some obscure Elevator Jazz when we go out in public and most of us deserve to get our asses beat. It won’t happen tho. We’re all gonna end up in bad marriages that others will envy cuz we’re better off in the ideal situations that will never happen.
Sip the coffee…it really tastes like shit. You drink it anyway because it’s there. You value it less than most but people make such a big fucking deal about corporate coffee that appreciating it 1/10th of what the average schmuck does makes you opine it as fantastic. We’ve all found ourselves waking up wishing that we had a certain store’s coffee. I’m sure it’s more psychological than anything else. We dig the interior design color schemes and the obligatory smiles from the baristas making minimum wage. You associate a company with a great experience you had at one of their stores but it probably had almost nothing to do with the store at all. You go back over and over trying to regain that same manic experience, but it’s never the same. The thing is: all those stores are the same. The coffee is the same generic bullshit. It’s mass produced and mass consumed and you’re a fool for drinking it just the same as I am but what the fuck else are ya gonna do…go sit at a park? You can go to any park in the country and it’ll probably be empty…no matter what the weather is like. Yet, it can be 100 degrees outside and a corporate coffee shop will be packed. They’ll have the air conditioning on full blast and the shitty Jazz music on low.

The architecture is banal and ambiguous. The ceiling tiles are all in complimentary angles and the slow curvature of the walls makes you feel like you’re experiencing the future, but you aren’t. The companies cut as many corners as they can and the amount of low-cost, illusory high-fashion garbage these days is staggering. If anything, it’s OCD riddled. It may look linear and clean, but what it’s really hiding is frightening. I mean: You can put a designer suit on a stack of shit but it’s still a stack of shit. Arty people rarely hang out in these corporate coffee stores. If they do so, it’s in passing during those days when you do have an extra couple bucks to waste on some corruption. I mean: You can’t hate what you don’t know about. What you end up finding out is that the coffee makes you wanna shit and that most people go for the frilly, floofy coffee flavored drinks. The greenest people love teas and the foods that are menued in foreign languages. The worldly intellectuals are the ones ordering venti sized drinks and paninis. They go to cafes and hide behind faux designer sunglasses. They’re the corporate bosses that treat their employees like idiots and the women that allow their husbands to beat the shit out of them and their kids. Every single unhappy idiot files into these places for a bit of culture but they aren’t getting anything they wouldn’t get at a grocery store or a fast food joint. They’re the white-collar bastards in sports coats and the prettiest girls in school wearing skirts that are just too revealing. They are the people that need sit-coms and cigarettes to survive. They are the women that label themselves bitches and the guys that openly use women for sex.

Finish your coffee and go to the shop across the street…I dare you. It’ll be the same and drastically different. Maybe the music will be louder. Maybe the architecture will be more limited cuz it’s a smaller place. It’s the same quasi-intellectualism. The same unapproachable people that talk too loudly and ignorant fuckers behind the counter. You can’t help but hate the second place less, tho. What happened is that you forgot what stupid people are capable of. Corporate bookstores and coffee shops serve many purposes, but the only thing they really do is lower your IQ. It’s more than context, tho…you don’t need the bullshit. On a psychological level, you just might need contact with strangers, but the type of strangers you see at these places are the worst types. You’re better off going to a bar at midnight and talking to a drunk sports fan or some bleach-blonde tart.

What corporations have done is taken all the surface aspects of coffee houses and bookstores, broken them down into a science, and watered them down for the general public to enjoy. Thing is: You will be hard-pressed to find most of the corporate customers in actual coffee houses or used book stores. It’s like…how the White people that feel it necessary to feel White-guilt listen to a bit of trendy Hip-Hop and use a bit of Ebonic slang to orient themselves with Black people but they never hang out in the hood. The average person couldn’t handle a true artist so they hang out in the corporate stores cuz it’s watered down artism. It’s the middle aged person going thru an identity crisis updating their personality profiles 10 times a day. It’s trying to keep in touch by staying in touch with the out of touch.

Even if these corporate places started as actual coffeehouses and bookstores, they aren’t anymore. It’s just corporate shit handed down from the suits above. All the employees are limited in their clout and no one really does anything but enforce what they are told to. They do what they were trained to do and most snags have already been documented. There is tons of literature on what to do with irate customers and when supplies run out. There’s a corporate standard way of doing almost everything and it’s written in a way that the dumbest assholes and cunts can handle it. That’s why a store can be run by a responsible 19 year old and they don’t ask your birthday on job applications. After breaking it down into a science, you can keep labor costs ridiculously low. You don’t have to hire a 35 year old to manage the store. The store is already managed by the rigorous standards. There’s at least 1 video camera in each store. Theft is rare.
What’s fucked up is that all of these places have employees that have worked at similar stores. They all feel the same cuz they’re run by the same people…just at different points in history. Joe Dickhead was a barista at one place and 2 years later he’s a manager at another. Corporations aren’t all that different…even if it’s a different type of store. They’re all running together. The corporate bookstore has a coffee shop in it and the corporate coffee shop sells a few cds. The corporate technology store sells some books. Many of these places have frequent buyer clubs. They all play generic enough music…whether it be Elevator Jazz or non-offensive Pop classics from then and now. All the coffee shops sell mugs and beans. They all have standard restaurant tables and a few comfortable, arty plush chairs. The atmosphere is all the same.

The true artist can look at it and see right thru it but once people lie to themselves for so long, they can’t stomach the truth. They become the whimsical adult that just goes with the flow and gets pissed at the naysayer for pointing out the painfully obvious. We all know it’s just capitalistic bullshit, but who really cares? At least we can waste money on overpriced shit everywhere! We all know that we’re buying the brand, not the item’s quality…and these days, a brand is just a clever name and a bored Art major away. It doesn’t take a creative genius to come up with a logo and a jingle. I mean: How many songs have you heard where the chorus is just one line repeated over and over? Most musicians can play in a myriad of styles, even if those styles aren’t their forte. Heck, we’ve all known the kid in high school that seemed to be one person one week and another the next. Adapting and changing is what we just do. 25 years ago, arty people were just plain weird, now everyone’s a bit arty thanks to these corporations.

Fuck…every corporate coffee shop has one older, creepy guy that sits on his laptop until his battery dies. He sucks down the same medium coffee for about 3 hours and the employees fucking love regulars. They have to. And, college is so obligatory these days that everyone is an intellectual. You can overhear the dumbest conversations in the world and after rationalizing that these people are basically stupid, you hear that they’re seniors at the local university. Really, what the fuck are they teaching in colleges these days? Surely not smarts. A trendy moron that goes to college comes out of college a trendy moron. All that talk of how you can take the boy out the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out of the boy works for trendy moronics too.

We become adults and we have to learn to idiotically banter like adults. Yah, it’s not much different than blabbering on like teen girls having their first sleepover…but please don’t take that as slander against womankind. Really, all you learn in college is how to comport averagely. That’s it. You fuck around and wind up with an average job…and nothing is outside of the scope of average. You can be a dishwasher or a doctor. A rockstar or a rocket scientist. It doesn’t matter. You’re just an asshole after all. We all know that philosophers are/were assholes. Nothing is gonna save you from looking important when you fuck around with your phone in public…no matter what you are doing. You can be saving a note to take a big shit later or how to cure cancer…you look equally important and pretentious. It doesn’t matter how big or small your laptop is, you still look like a brainy fuck. We have no choice but to give people the benefit of the doubt. Chances are that most people are just doing stupid shit but you never know…so you have to treat everyone like a potential genius. Especially those gabby fuckers that want to talk to everyone. Talking in public is taught in schools all over the country. Social butterflies are a dime a dozen.

It’s very nihilistic…I know. It renders everything useless and probably ignorant. There’s only so much faith you can have in humanity…even if it’s all the faith in the world, that ‘all’ is finite. At some point you can only see stupidity in people. People become their archetypes. They are either needy or obviously trying really hard not to be noticed. Opposites attract and someone out there is either just like you or so much unlike you that you’ll end up friends…which will end with you being similar. Being human is a trap. I don’t care if this sounds crazy. You might think it’s crazy, but it’s really just something you can’t understand because you’re a dipshit.

The funny thing about corporate coffee is that at a certain temperature, it all tastes like shit. When it’s hot, it’s awesome. When it’s cold, it’s awesome. Yet, there is that medium…an average, if you will…that just renders it dirty bean water that makes you jittery and lose sleep. It’s that moment when you end up just like everyone else. You may have felt really different and special earlier, but you have become just like everyone. You are fascinated by technology and the curvature of the next set of titts you see. Another handsome dude walks in and gains the temporary attention of every straight chick and gay dude in the store. After a short while, it all ends up communal. We’re all just existing together.

It’s a shame. Why? Because no one is special. We’re all different but replaceable. The corporations are right. We are just bodies put into positions where bodies are needed. Some people are better at some things and others are better at others. At some point, philosophy ends. At another point, fiction ends. Creativity is both infinite and limited. What fuels creativity are limitations.

I dunno. Maybe I should quit drinking coffee.

The End