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Sometimes, I’m surprised at what sends me down a rabbit hole. Recently I was in an airport, waiting to board my plane, and I was sitting near a Starbucks. I kept watching the baristas making Frappuccinos and then dumping out a little bit of leftover drink from the blender after filling the cups.
I’ve seen this before, and I’ve never understood or really liked it, so I Googled something like, “Why does Starbucks throw away leftovers reddit.” (For most questions like this, Reddit is generally much more useful than Google.)
After a couple of threads about food safety and dumping expired baked goods, I found what I was looking for: a thread on the question of customers asking for the leftover amount in the blender to be given to them in a second cup.
Reading those comments made me think of the expression, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” I found myself sort of aghast at the hostile way baristas in the thread talked about customers: basically accusing them of stealing, and saying things like, “I’d smile at him and dump the leftovers down the drain while he watched.”
Here’s [ [link removed] ] one barista asking about company policy: “Can we give away the leftover of a frapp? Some people order it with all these modifications so that there’s more in the drink (free ones like extra frapp roast), and then ask me to cup the ‘leftovers’ and put whip/topping on it. I feel like that’s ... stealing? You paid for one drink, the leftovers aren’t yours. The drink you paid for is yours.”
Here’s another take [ [link removed] ]: “Whatever people are saying in this thread, I still often find myself ending up with a little bit extra. Probably not enough to make another tall portion, but as many have pointed out already, you get what you pay for. If you have enough excess to make another tall and they ask for it, too bad for the customer - they paid for a grande, and that’s all they paid for. Even if it goes down the sink and is considered a waste, if they didn’t pay for it, they’re not getting it, because that’s a free drink.”
And if you want more “Whose side are you on?” fodder, here’s a thread where you have a clueless customer versus a bunch of baristas [ [link removed] ]. You’ll either never want to walk into a Starbucks again, or never serve another customer again.
Why are there leftovers, anyway? Sometimes it’s because of extras customers add in (40 pumps of syrup or whatnot), and so when everything is said and done there’s inevitably a little extra of the base drink left. But sometimes it’s because when you’re in a rush, it’s easier to make too much of something than to risk not making enough. After all, it’s easier to toss the extra frapp away than to have to make a little bit more of it from scratch.
Even so, is it really wrong or “stealing” for the customer to get these leftovers, but not for the company to literally throw them away? To some, the answer apparently is yes.
Here’s a little digression before we get to the legal question: It’s not healthy to be exposed to other people’s shop talk like this. It induces distrust, which is why shop talk should stay in the shop. Your preconceived idea of who someone might be turns you into their preconceived idea of who you might be. If you go in thinking “Are you one of those bastards who thinks I’m a bastard?” then you’re the bastard.
On some level it’s a kind of vice to expose yourself to other people’s private thoughts, even if they are technically being published to the world. This, by the way, is the fundamental issue with the internet and especially with social media. By nature, it blurs the public-private distinction. It introduces a layer of meta-friction into real life, because suddenly you have, or think you have, some foreknowledge of who or what a total real-world stranger really is.
So, who does own the leftovers?
“You get what fits in the cup size you bought” strikes me as an argument, not an observation. That appears to be the viewpoint of the company and the majority of its workers: The cup determines the ownership of the drink, and the drink itself is tangential. As a customer, however, my default argument would be that I get—which is to say that I “own”—the ingredients the barista uses to make my order, and that the cup size is almost tangential to that. This is the sort of thing that you could take before a court and that a judge could write a legal opinion about. It’s kind of like, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
I’m not exaggerating. Here is a fascinating thread on X [ [link removed] ] about exclusivity clauses in shopping centers—where major retailers get the terms of their lease to stipulate that no competitor will be allowed in the shopping center. They have this leverage because they’re desirable tenants to the commercial landlord.
But this can raise some very interesting questions. If the clause says, for example, “No other sandwich shops,” what’s the legal definition of “sandwich”? The thread author gives a real-life example: A bagel shop that cut the bagels in half and spread them with cream cheese was accused of selling “sandwiches” by a sandwich shop in the same center. What about a falafel shop stipulating no other “Mediterranean food”? Does that ban gyros? (What about tacos al pastor? Could a Panda Express ban a pollo a la brasa shop from selling Peruvian fried rice?) Starbucks—apropos here—will often have clauses preventing other tenants from selling espresso or coffee drinks [ [link removed] ].
Most of the time the definitional disputes over these clauses are probably settled without litigation, but sometimes it comes to that. In 2001, there was a court case settling a dispute between Panera Bread and Qdoba Mexican Grill [ [link removed] ]. Panera accused Qdoba of selling “sandwiches” in violation of a no-sandwich clause; the “sandwiches” in question were burritos. The judge determined that a burrito is not a sandwich, and it came down to this: “Worcester Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Locke cited Webster’s Third New International Dictionary definition of a sandwich and explained that the difference comes down to two slices of bread versus one tortilla.”
So although “who owns the leftovers” might seem little more than an impertinent request from a pushy customer, it could also be a genuinely interesting legal question.
What might be analogous to this issue of uncertain ownership of a product?
My customer brain thinks of those theme parks where they take your picture and display it, and taunt you with the knowledge that they’ll throw it in the garbage if you don’t pay $30 for it. I sort of think, Come on, if you’re going to “steal” it from yourself, why can’t I steal it from you? Why can’t we just say it’s actually mine and forget the $30?
But here’s a more credible example: If you order takeout and the cook makes more than quite fits in the standard container, is he theoretically entitled to throw it away? Or does he theoretically owe it to you, even if it means using a second container? In other words, who owns the food made for your order? And is the relevant metric “made for your order” or “fits in the container corresponding to your order size”?
In an in-person dining situation, where the food is plated, the portions can vary a bit and the customer, or even the cook, might not notice. But in a takeout setting, you could debate whether the rule is “You get what fits in the takeout container” or “You get what the kitchen cooked to fulfill your order.”
And many questions like this never get definitively settled until someone brings what might feel like a petty lawsuit and a judge decides to entertain it. This might all strike you as altogether too much thinking about a meaningless, small-ball question. And I understand why something like the Starbucks leftovers issue gets such a rise out of so many baristas. If they had to pour the leftovers, then some guy inevitably would say, “Oh, can you put whipped cream and caramel drizzle on that one too? Or since it already fills the cup up one-third, can you give me two-thirds of a cup of whipped cream? Or, how about a third cup that’s all whipped cream? I’m a pig, oink oink!”
Yes, I’m exaggerating, but if you work in a customer-facing job, even I know that many versions of this basic scenario, minus the oinking, will happen. And the countervailing idea to “The customer is always right” is that the company will have your back to some extent in situations like this.
So that may not quite be an example of consumer advocacy. But a lot of genuine consumer advocacy of the Ralph Nader era or style would and did sound at times like small-ball stuff. It can be tough sometimes to distinguish petty insistence from the principle of the thing. There’s no doubt we take some important, hard-won reforms for granted—truth-in-advertising laws and warranty validity laws, to name but a few. And just in case you’re wondering, the McDonald’s coffee that sparked that infamous lawsuit really did severely burn the plaintiff [ [link removed] ].
The FTC once gave Campbell’s Soup a hard time [ [link removed] ] for putting marbles in the bottom of the bowl used in their advertising shoot. You remember: The marbles would make all the stuff in the soup float to the top, implying that there was more stuff in the soup than there really was. (A consumer group at the time wanted the FTC to go further and sue Campbell’s, which they declined to do.)
You can dismiss all this, affirm that people aren’t that stupid, remember the wisdom of “buyer beware,” snicker that of course it’s not going to look like the ad. But ... why? If the ad doesn’t show what you’re buying, then what are you buying? There’s a point at which a certain libertarian-ish attitude on these matters can become a willingness to be screwed with.
The consumer advocates of the 1970s and 1980s believed we should be able to trust what we were buying and who we were buying from, and that it was a legitimate use of the state’s power to make that so.
Starbucks baristas dumping an ounce of sugary ice in the middle of a rush is probably not on the order of sneaky warranty policies or dishonest advertising. But Starbucks, the company, treating its own self-interested point of view on the leftovers matter—that the cup, and not the ingredients, determines what was bought and owned—as an obvious fact, might be. Likewise, I can understand how applying the principle of consumer advocacy here could make things harder for people whose jobs are already stressful and difficult. But I’m also inclined to think that when customers feel as though a corporate policy is unfair or frustratingly arbitrary in favor of the company, they’re more likely than not to be on to something.
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