Barista Benevolence: the Caring Connection  

Customers hear it often…” What are you having today?”

The order is placed…

The brew begins…click, click, click, the expresso drops into the handled machine cup…pfsst, pfsst, the steam cuts through milk & its evolving substitutes…. sounds that could come from a steel stamping factory 50 years ago.

But this is now as the baristas of the 2020’s serves up brew and lots more in the daily lives of the parade of seeker-customers, looking for a bio-emotional pick me up from a warm voice, accompanied by a caffeine something. The new customers arrive hoping to find that additional something they seek, the old ones come to get their routine hit of humanized moments. The coffee is not an excuse exactly, but often it is secondary.

The exchanges are often inter-generational. Older men, like me in my 70’s, interact with late adolescent early adult women in ways that don’t usually happen. The young ones endure the unasked-for advice, the books recommended, never to be read. They get a lot of advice, often more about the giver’s need to spout than the barista needing to learn.

More women join the barista band than men. Reasons must abound for this. Names of all kinds, common for their birth time, and less so: Aubrey and Dee, Melody and Georgia, Jordan and Sarah, Charlie and Beck. They work their memories to get to know ours…and they know our drink habits too—” the usual, John?”

The big coffee chains might be the start, but the soulful local shops, are where many turn. Barista work can be tough: the abuse of having to be present all the time; the same drink processes, the occasional boredom, the hectic hours when short staffed, all on your feet all the time.

The work can be transactional…money for coffee. But mostly, the benevolence begins at the start. The smile, the kind word, the query on our day so we can report a little or a big thing, or nothing but a…” kinda busy today”

If we come often enough, the usual meeting grows to an anticipated mini-engagement: once in a while, even close to a friendship. But certainly, at the least, it’s a caring connection customers count on, to brighten our days, bring heart into our caffeine consumption, get to a feeling before starting our heady device maneuverings or getting behind the wheel.

Sure, it’s about the perkiness of the coffee. Just as much, and more for many, it’s the benevolence of the light layer of trust and caring. Our techno-mediated culture loses the social capital of this needed layer by feeling free to insult each other anonymously on some platform.

Thanks, baristas. You do more good than you know in the invisible relational world of humans rubbing against other humans. This is the inner world so under-valued by a culture focused on outside accomplishments