Coming from this post:
https://lemmy.world/post/24352555
Ordering coffee in the USA triggers me
I went to dunkin’ the other day and asked for an iced latte with less ice because it’s winter and I wanted less ice. They gave me a cup that was halfway full of coffee. So I asked why and they told me they press a button on a machine, it fills it halfway full with coffee and then they add ice. So when you get a medium iced latte, you’re not actually getting a medium latte, you’re getting a small or a kids size nowadays of coffee, and then they just fill the rest of it with ice. If you ask for less ice, no screw you, you’re not getting the full amount of coffee that you paid for…
I have never heard of this in any other country. What the hell?
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A friend of mine refuses to put ice in anything because it gives you more of the drink you paid for and it doesn’t get watered down over time
Sounds like a friend of mine that refused the free water at a Chinese buffet, because they were just trying to get him to eat less
Typically all water is free at US restaurants, buffet or otherwise. Not sure if that’s the case in other countries or not.
Yeah, his idea was that they gave you water for free because it would fill you up, meaning you ate less at the buffet, and he wanted to maximize the value of his money
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There’s two ways to look at it.
One is capitalist: you pay for the coffee that’s in the big cup, not the size of the cup. So it’s impossible to ask for less ice and yet get more coffee. It simply isn’t realistic in a capitalist system to try and game the system in that way. You could try others, but that one is going to fail unless the drink is a loss leader, or is already over priced to begin with.
The other side is a general take where you did get what you asked for. You asked for less ice, in an iced coffee, in a standard sized cup.
Even if everything was free across the board, if you want more coffee and less ice, you’d need to ask for that.
But, any way you cut it, you aren’t getting “too much ice”. What you’re wanting is more of the coffee drink in the same size cup. Nothing wrong with that! But you have to also realize that part of making an iced coffee is guesstimating how much melt there’s going to be, and factor that into how “strong” the coffee itself is. If your cups are built around a 50/50 volume, with the expectation that the coffee is going to melt 10% of that as it contacts that amount of ice; when you change the amount of ice, you change the amount of water that melts out in the initial pour.
That changes the drink, and requires more than only changing the volume of ice and coffee, you have to change the brew as well. Otherwise, you won’t be getting the same drink you had before.
Think about it. If you usually have your 1 cup of coffee, with 1 tablespoon of milk, will it taste the same if you reduce the coffee by 1 tablespoon and add another tablespoon of milk? Obviously not, though it might be a marginal change.
Reducing the ice by half by itself is already going to change the end result. Increasing the coffee volume too changes it even more. While it’s entirely possible to make the same taste happen, it takes doing it per cup, which has a lot of extra work compared to a standardized setup.
Each ingredient of an iced latte is factored into the price. Did they expect to get a free extra shot of espresso without having to pay for it? Or did they want their drink diluted with extra milk? OP is essentially asking for a large drink at the price of a medium. Coffee beans and milk are more expensive than ice.
This is just an excuse to charge you more for less. Unless they are using magic beans and milk or are so inexplicably swamped they literally cannot spare the insignificant amount it’d take to give you what you want then this nonsense is unnecessary.
They charge you their price for what they give you.
If you feel like you get too little for your money, no one forces you to buy it.And? That doesn’t mean they aren’t actively ripping people off. I don’t rent but that doesn’t mean i can’t look at the rent prices in my city and get annoyed. Being anti greed is a good thing.
Then don’t order from them? Evidently enough people don’t think it is a ripoff or think the convenience is worth it if they are still in business
I’m not? That doesn’t excuse the blatant greed. Sure this is a tiny facet of a much larger problem, but acting like it’s totally cool to be a miser, business or no, is fucked.
Sure, it IS fucked, but you’re getting what you paid for, and knew the amount in advance. Should the cup be filled all the way? Maybe, but you’re not getting anything less in this situation. It isn’t like they poured half the coffee out, or like you ordered a sandwich with no tomato so they took half the meat off as well. If you order a sandwich, pay for a sandwich, ask for no tomato, and get a sandwich with no tomato but they didn’t add extra meat to offset the lack of tomato, you didn’t get ripped off. The price of the sandwich might have been a rip off to begin with, but it isnt a rip off because of the removal of tomato.
This is what people don’t like to understand: you can make your own stuff at home, and bring something (water? coffee in a thermos?) with you where you need to go. You choose what you do, not what others do. But enragement tactics gotta spread their messages farther (on platforms like Reddit, and X, and Facebook) for the sake of profits I guess… Except: do they? Especially here on the Fediverse? Here we can choose to let all of that go, if we want. 🆓
That said, if I understood OOP correctly they are saying that they receive less value for the money from iced coffee than for a regular coffee - leaving out the crucial details that we here would have needed to know, like whether the iced vs. regular were the same price, though making sure to retain all of the emotional judgey overtones ofc, taking care of the important stuff and the rest is just details! 😛
OP complained that when they order what’s usually half a cup of coffee with half a cup of ice, but without the ice, they only get half a cup of coffee for the same price, instead of a full cup of coffee.
Right. Which is identically the same amount of coffee as it always was, simply less ice… as they asked for, and were given.
If they expected to be given more coffee in return for less money, then they should rethink their expectations, bc that would be entitlement thinking.
More likely, I thought they might have finally started to think more deeply about how much iced coffee costs compared to hot coffee, and only just then started to realize that it has never been something worth the price. They could have done that type of thinking at any time. Although in this case, they did not give us as the audience sufficient information, specifically the relationship between the costs of those two drinks.
Edit: sorry and now I may be doing the same. A “latte” is not the same as a “coffee” in the USA. The former is a mixture of espresso and steamed milk, while the latter is a “drip coffee”, so an entirely different preparation method of the beans, the liquid itself, its storage duration, and too the milk, plus possibly effort from the server although in this case it sounds like a machine for everything. But still the ingredients lsit differs between “latte” and “coffee”. And then from there I get lost bc ordering a latte but being given a coffee would be sufficient grounds to return it for either a full refund or else exchange for what was ordered? Thus I presumed that thenceforth, “coffee” actually meant “latte”, which included the milk portion as well. But that’s an assumption. And then another assumption is that the coffee portions are also identical between the iced vs. non. They legitimately might be - I dunno? - but I also don’t know for sure.
I used to work at a cafe. The savviest customers would ask for an iced drink without ice and also a separate cup of ice. It’s the smart move and saves you a bit of money.
