this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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How to order coffee, get what you want and keep the line moving without any needless human interaction.
I'm from Seattle and so many tourists want to chat up the barista. Go to the stripe and sip coffee stand for that. If you are ordering something that requires more than 10 words, use the app or be prepared to get something left off and move on. For the love of choice don't try to chat with some stranger in the line.
Humans generally don't want to interact with needles while waiting to get their coffee. Needles are pointy and can poke you.
And that's one of the reasons why a big part of the rest of the world think that the people living in the USA are rude. It's not just about needless interactions, you don't interact at all. No hi, no please, no thanks, no goodbye, no have a nice day, no sorry, no time. I'm glad I never learnt how to be rude and that's not a skill I'll try to teach my kids.
Actually the opposite is true. Most of the world tends to think that Americans are overly friendly and informal, though obviously there's a lot of variation.
Having been to quite a few countries in Europe, I've heard more about UK tourists than USA tourists, although the few UK tourists I met were friendly.
The USA is a massive country with hundreds of millions of people. There are rude people, but there are also friendly people. It just depends on where you are (and unfortunately in some places who you are). Having been to Seattle, people were generally friendly, but you can't blame the barista for wanting to get through the line that goes out the door and two blocks down the road.
Based on the Americans I met, I don't believe that is generally true. It varies a lot by region and social environment.
I don't think it's rude. I've been in many places where people just don't make needless conversation. We interact just fine overall. Specially if you go to some place like southern California. Just Seattle in particular is a lot like the UK not only in weather but in social grouping. People in the UK also don't needlessly interact.
Feel free to chat up the baristas if there is no line. Otherwise they just want to power through the rush of people and don't give a shit about meaningless small talk.
Also the barista may not want to talk to you but they are forced to nicely interact because they'd lose their job if they told you to go away.
I'm from Portland and my complaint is nearly the opposite; that the baristas try to be too friendly/chatty with me. I don't want to talk to you, I want my goddamned coffee and once I've had that I might be inclined to chat.
I even tell my employees not to talk to me until after I've had my coffee.
Portland and Seattle are fairly opposites. Keep Portland weird and all. Seattle is also a big tech hub and that means a lot of quiet, shy, introverted engineers. Portland has tech but not as much.
Scarcely. This is the tyranny of small differences. Portland and Seattle have way more in common with one another than they do with any other big cities in the US. Sure, there are differences, but to the rest of the world they seem trivial.
It's notable, for example, that even something so organic as Seattle's "grunge" music scene actually had its roots in Portland with all of the proto-grunge bands, like Napalm Beach and Dead Moon that came out of Portland's Satyricon in the 1980s.
It's still all the one but Seattle has moved into a big corporate city and doesn't support the same sort of people as Portland does.