You want grease with you coffee?
Oh great, I appear to have a new vice. Having switched my morning beverage from the reasonably priced Americano to the more ‘aspirational’ latte, I’ve not had a chance to indulge because I’ve been late for my train every morning this week, meaning that the last part of my stroll to the station, securing of coffee and then perusal of the more lurid tabloid headlines at the newspaper table has been abandoned in favour of a sweaty, grunting desperate sprint to get to the train before it pulls out of the station leaving me trembling with impotent rage and considering crying.
Arriving at Victoria, hummmn, Krispy Kreme stand appears to have no queue. Admittedly, with Krispy Kreme clientel, it only takes one of them to form a queue, indeed one is a small crowd, two is a mob and three is a gravity singularity. So try the latte from there…oh, and an original glazed please.
The latte is great, the doughnut is sublime (and comes in a little waxed paper bag – I mean, how lovely is that – in a world choking to death with plastic bags, you get a little greaseproof paper bag that would not be out of place in the 1950s. Possibly this is a superb marriage of design and function but more probably a reaction to some twat that got grease from the doughnut on his suit and sued the company).
What really stands out though is the service, the KK staff are the friendliest, cheeriest people you could hope to meet. And believe me, at a railway station this makes them stand out like a fairy cake on a manure pile. And it’s not that false, corporate, Stepford friendliness either, the sort that comes out of a corporate instruction manual or, if push comes to shove, a bottle rattling with pills. That sort of cheery just makes you want to batter the server with whatever you are buying – good if it’s a rolled up magazine, less effective if it’s pillows – and scream ‘I hate being here more than you! Let’s just move on!’
This KK cheeriness comes from one of three things. Either the staff have not been on the job long enough to be ground down yet (I can kind of see this, but not sure it would translate to other realms, for instance, the time elapsed between pinning on a badge saying ‘MacDs, here to help’ and developing a simmering resentment of the world and deep self-loathing that will probably lead to your masturbating into the mayo while grinning at the CCTV is probably 0.23 seconds). Or, they are allowed as many doughnuts and coffee as they like and are manic on sugar, fat and caffeine. Or they are just normal and they simply appear cheery in proportion to the rest of us.
Whatever, they bring a little sunshine into my day. Serving out of a tiny kiosk on a busy railway station platform can’t be a picnic, but they do a great job. God alone knows what a hash of it an English person might make. The English do not do service. I think they think it demeans them. That’s tripe of course, you only have to go abroad to realise that your waiter is there to help you have a great evening. Possibly the problem is the English consumer who doesn’t know how to behave when interacting with staff and so dredges their memory for interaction with staff, latches onto ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ and acts accordingly.
Arriving at Victoria, hummmn, Krispy Kreme stand appears to have no queue. Admittedly, with Krispy Kreme clientel, it only takes one of them to form a queue, indeed one is a small crowd, two is a mob and three is a gravity singularity. So try the latte from there…oh, and an original glazed please.
The latte is great, the doughnut is sublime (and comes in a little waxed paper bag – I mean, how lovely is that – in a world choking to death with plastic bags, you get a little greaseproof paper bag that would not be out of place in the 1950s. Possibly this is a superb marriage of design and function but more probably a reaction to some twat that got grease from the doughnut on his suit and sued the company).
What really stands out though is the service, the KK staff are the friendliest, cheeriest people you could hope to meet. And believe me, at a railway station this makes them stand out like a fairy cake on a manure pile. And it’s not that false, corporate, Stepford friendliness either, the sort that comes out of a corporate instruction manual or, if push comes to shove, a bottle rattling with pills. That sort of cheery just makes you want to batter the server with whatever you are buying – good if it’s a rolled up magazine, less effective if it’s pillows – and scream ‘I hate being here more than you! Let’s just move on!’
This KK cheeriness comes from one of three things. Either the staff have not been on the job long enough to be ground down yet (I can kind of see this, but not sure it would translate to other realms, for instance, the time elapsed between pinning on a badge saying ‘MacDs, here to help’ and developing a simmering resentment of the world and deep self-loathing that will probably lead to your masturbating into the mayo while grinning at the CCTV is probably 0.23 seconds). Or, they are allowed as many doughnuts and coffee as they like and are manic on sugar, fat and caffeine. Or they are just normal and they simply appear cheery in proportion to the rest of us.
Whatever, they bring a little sunshine into my day. Serving out of a tiny kiosk on a busy railway station platform can’t be a picnic, but they do a great job. God alone knows what a hash of it an English person might make. The English do not do service. I think they think it demeans them. That’s tripe of course, you only have to go abroad to realise that your waiter is there to help you have a great evening. Possibly the problem is the English consumer who doesn’t know how to behave when interacting with staff and so dredges their memory for interaction with staff, latches onto ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ and acts accordingly.
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