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Comment by paulrademacher | Hacker News Reader

Mind you, this was prompted by a question from Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. You know, the company that endlessly confuses people with the words Tall, Grande, and Venti :-)

But while an industry outsider may be unfamiliar with the term "user," I've never worked anywhere where we didn't have the highest appreciation for, and commitment to, the people who use our software. The term does not have any negative connotation to it, and there's not an industry-wide problem here to fix.

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I imagine Schultz has probably heard some derogatory comments about "Starbucks users". For companies that provide a service (as opposed to a product), it probably sounds more innocuous, to the point where you wouldn't question it.

Edit: to be clear, I'm referring to someone saying "users" in the sense of "drug users". "McDonald's users" is another one I hear occasionally.

Ever notice that if you ask for a large at Starbucks, the barista will confirm: "Venti?"

It wouldn't surprise me if this were a designed response from Starbucks, encouraging their customers to develop and internalize the Starbucks dialect.

well, a problem that I had when I was a barista (at a different coffee chain, back in 2001), was that we didn't have three sizes, we had four. So if somebody asked for a medium, I would get confused and say "well, we have two mediums", and if someone asked for a large I would have to ask "did you want the one that would reasonably be called large or did you want the one that is actually the largest that we have?". Whenever I tried to standardize "small, medium, large, extra-large" or "tiny, small, medium, large", then always half of the people would end up the wrong thing and get upset. It was lose-lose.

So now when I go to a cafe I say "I'd like a twelve ounce coffee", so I don't have to try to translate that through their local notion of whether that's "small" or "medium" or "tall"

"No, large."

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