Travel Missteps: Clearing out Starbucks

I had never been to a Starbucks prior to my trip to Japan. Crazy right!? The key reason was that I didn’t drink coffee, as I’m highly sensitive to caffeine. I also was a bit intimidated by ordering, as I had no idea what to order (or in fact what I would be ordering.)

That hesitation was thrown out the window when the other students in my exchange group insisted they get their morning coffee. It was much easier to ask questions when the entire group had no idea how to order what they wanted in Japanese. So I could innocently say “Hey what is that delicious non-coffee drink called?” It was a shot in the dark, I actually had no idea IF Starbucks had non-coffee drinks. But my gamble paid off: “Which one? The vanilla one?” “Uh…sure…” “Its the Vanilla Bean Frappuccino.”

And while we were there, we found that Starbucks also served a hot breakfast! (At this time stores in the US did not.) So we ordered hot breakfast sandwiches. The problem was that they were so tiny to our standards, that everyone ordered at least two each. I assisted in ordering in Japanese to the bewildered Starbucks staff. They would ask me again and again “Two? For Two different people?” “No, Two for one person.” They thought we were crazy.

I, who had never been to a Starbucks in my life, found that we went there every day while we were in Tokyo, and sometimes more than once per day. By the third day, the staff saw us walking up. “No more” they said, crossing their arms in an X. “No more” they said again. That is when I realized we had eaten probably their entire week’s stock of breakfast food in 3 days.

You see in Japan, their stores are extremely small, so they rely heavily on business systems that predict how often a product sells in a given timeframe and only order just the amount that they need. (Heck, Japanese 7-11s are so on point that they can predict to the point that the their stock changes throughout the day. Just enough stock of breakfast food that sells out right before they get a delivery of lunch food, that sells out before dinner food is delivered, and then before the evening snacks! Its an amazing system!) But their system didn’t factor for a small army of hungry American exchange students staying at a nearby hotel, so they had run out of food prior to being re-stocked.