It's official, the World's Worst Starbucks location is at 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20004.
This is the closest Starbucks to my workplace. I have lately developed the (bad) habit of having a mocha frappucino for lunch, so I go here. Everyone really must visit this place, it is something special. To illustrate why this place is so great, consider the following incidents (all of which have happened in the last 60 days):
1) Some of the workers there know me, so they know that I like my frappucino with whipped cream but not with the fudge topping they usually put on them. The woman who knows me prepares my frap, complete with the whipped cream, but then has to duck under the counter to get a plastic cover. In the two seconds she turned away, another employee rushed over from five feet away, grabbed the fudge, and poured a HUGE gob on my frap, all as I looked on in horror. Team play, guy.
2) On at least four occasions I have seen them assign a non-English speaker to the register while four or five fluent English speakers made the drinks. This has predictable results. Every time someone orders, he needs to call over a colleague to translate, or even in one case to figure out what a bill is worth. One time I saw the entire store grind to a halt for 10 minutes while he tried to process a refund. It was hysterical, there were four employees huddled around the counter and the woman who wanted the refund was losing her mind, and the line was going almost out the door. The person trying to get a refund eventually decided to eat whatever money they owed her and walked away in disgust.
3) I came in one Saturday to find three people standing behind the machines but nobody at the register. I asked them if I could order. At that point, one of the employees starts barking into the back room, asking a cashier to come out. When he does, she starts tearing him a new asshole, right in front of me. The highlight was when she implored him to "at least TRY to act like a professional".
4) I came in another slow day and ordered my frap and got rung up. I wandered over to the newsstand to peruse the Washington Post while I waited for them to make my order. I guess I got engrossed in whatever I was reading because after 10 minutes I remembered to get my order. Well, it wasn't up yet. I asked what was going on, and the employee literally slapped his forehead and said, oh, I forgot. There was like, one other customer in the store at the time.
5) Then there was the Ipod-listening cashier. You could get your order in as long as you repeated yourself two or three times, and as long as you were willing to wait for your change while he changed the song on his Ipod. I think I complained about that guy, and perhaps I had some effect - I haven't seen him in a while.
6) Mindful of 4, above, I now watch them like hawks to make sure they are actually making the drinks I pay for in a timely fashion (after all, time is money, the firm bills me out at something like $400/hour). One time when I didn't get my frap right away, I asked the guy working the machines what the deal was (in a polite way). He snapped at me, "I'm getting it, ok?!". Then when it was ready he scowled and literally shoved it across the counter at me.
I don't think any of my trips to this Starbucks ever go smoothly, but I still go out of habit and because sometimes the amusement value of incidents like this outweighs the aggravation. I do feel like I should stop rewarding incompetence though.
