Aaron

Is the attempted ramming in the room with us?

That used to be their whole shtick, the third place experience. They wanted people to treat Starbucks as where they go when they want to relax or meet with friends, a place outside of their home and work, where the baristas knew their names and would chat and make them feel welcome. Especially a lot of older folks liked that, and would make it part of their routine. Starbucks threw that all away when they went to prioritising drive thru and mobile order/pay systems. It’s a shareholder business and this is capitalism. It’s either neverending growth or death.

In my experience, there can be very strong views on this question from people who identify as enby and/or trans. I always defer to what the enby person I am interacting with prefers identifies as, but know that what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander. I’d always suggest asking the person you’re referring to about how they personally identify, but I have had almost zero reason to ever ask. Pronouns are usually enough for day to day interactions and friends/family have always just volunteered without me asking (they’d give different responses to your question, by the way).

Edit: suggested to me that “prefer” sounds suggestive. How someone identifies isn’t a preference but a fact. Crossed out in original to show what changed, and I was assured it’s nitpicky but nice to not use prefer 😊

Absolutely right. It’s not a law for them, it’s a fine.

I’m no expert, but I was under the impression that their tools use not only facial recognition that can (with a non-perfect record) identify people wearing nose and below masks, but also identifies based on cell phone and geographic data. So if someone plans on relying on beating facial recognition, they’ll need to also beat the other tools in use by wearing a full mask, not carry a cell phone, etc.