Personal Dork Assistant

7-11 On 7-11

The recent DEHP additive scandal must've significantly impacted business at the Uni-President Group and their flagship Seven Eleven convenience stores. How to encourage customers to overlook poisonous ingredients and porous oversight? Sell it cheaper, of course! And what better occasion for it than July 11, coincident with the 7-11 name, and the nominal birthday of their cutesy Open mascot.

So the one-day promotion featured half-priced Slurpees and ice coffees. Which turned out to be convenient in the morning since I just ran out of coffee beans at home. A large iced latte and a "bagel" (i.e. a round hard roll) seemed like a decent enough breakfast option.

Or maybe that wasn't such a great idea, considering that I was getting late for work already. The store was full of impatient patrons waiting for their iced lattes, and soon I was part of the mob. Normally the super-automatic coffee machines makes coffee-making into a button-pressing operation. But with iced drinks they have to grab an ice pack from the fridge, rip it open, and dump it into the cup. Then rip open a syrup capsule to dump that into the cup, too, if the customer wants sugar.

That wouldn't even be so bad, since everything is packed in single-serving packets. But nowadays customization is the fashion in the Taiwan drinks market. So we've got the genius who wants her iced coffee with no ice, half sugar, extra milk. Now poor coffee guy has to shake in just enough ice cubes to melt and cool the espresso without leaving ice chunks, pour in only half a capsule of syrup, then add in the extra milk by hand to top off the cup. Five minutes later the lady's got her drink and the mob grows larger.

Thankfully my large ice latte (no sugar) is a common enough order, so once it got to be about my time I just grabbed the next cup that came off the line. And not be too late for work. Maybe I should grab another cup before the day ends. The more I buy, the more I'd save, no?