Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When I was a kid, I used to think that the food at a 5-star hotel would be great. Ah, the ignorance of youth. Today, I see my 11 yo daughter has the same misconception – she thinks coffee served at Starbucks is good. At that age, we’re used to assuming that the best things cost more. And that they come from the West…   When the Pune raised Laxman Narasimhan became the new CEO of Starbucks, unsurprisingly , filter coffee jokes like this circulated in India: Juxtaposing food and potty in a sentence is something that comes naturally to kids and their fathers. Like this Amazon Prime serial, Mind the Malhotras, where the kid announces to his parents that the pasta tastes like potty (Only a kid can come across a pasta that tastes bad). While his mom is taken aback, his dad asks him, “How do you know what potty tastes like? When did you taste it?” I put the same skillset to use as we were walking in HSR Layout. I pointed to a roadside tea stall to my daughter and putting in all the...

Everyone’s familiar with apologies that are not sincere or don’t sound sincere. But have you run into a situation where the sincere apology itself offended others? If not, check out what happened to Starbucks in Argentina. Some time back, Starbucks ran out of the imported cups with the Starbucks logo in Argentina. So the company decided to use blank cups made locally. They also decided to proactively apologize via Facebook and Twitter: “We apologize, as due to a temporary supply shortage, some shops are using national cups and sleeves. Salutations.” The choice of wording couldn’t have been worse, could it? It sounds as if they are apologizing for using Argentine cups, doesn’t it? No wonder the reaction was angry and, unsurprisingly, went viral on Twitter. And so Starbucks ended up apologizing for the apology. Starbucks was trying to be upfront and transparent about the situation; instead it just got into more trouble. I guess that’s why they say that no good deed goes unpunished!