Kim Gaskill orders a Starbucks Cloud Macchiato and notices it has more calories than a regular macchiato. When she tries to call the store for answers, the phone number is missing from the app, so she escalates to corporate customer service to find out why.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. Do you ever have one of those things that you just can't let go? I did that this morning. Well, I'm still doing that actually. It's not anything important. It's not anything that I need to know it, but I can't let it go. I went through drive-through at Starbucks this morning and I ordered my sister-in-law a Cloud Macchiato. Now it's a new drink. She normally gets the macchiatos and I don't know what the difference is, but it's like it's upside down. The foamy milky part is on top instead of the bottom. And so she's like, I gotta try that and see how they do that. And it is, it's like a cloud, a pillowy cloud sitting on the top. So we get it and I look up, she's like, it's probably less calories too because it's foam instead of milk. So of course I look it up on the app to see what the calorie count is, and I compared the two, and that's when it happened. That's when I got sucked down that rabbit hole of having to get the answer. I'm not gonna let it go until I get the answer. There is— and this is the dilemma— there is 20 less calories in the regular macchiato than there is the Cloud macchiato, but there is one less pump of caramel in the Cloud one. So logic would tell me the Cloud one should be less calories, less carbohydrates. But it's not, significantly not. And so I'm baffled as to why leaving off one pump of the caramel or the vanilla— I forget which one it is— actually made that drink have more calories and more carbohydrates. So I tried to call the store and ask them if they knew, because I was curious. And when I went to call the store, I noticed there's no phone number listed for the store in the app. And as I looked through the app at other stores I have saved, because I travel all around the country, there are several, and I've called several stores before, there are no numbers listed. So I'm thinking to myself, uh, did I totally miss it? Has Starbucks changed their app and they're not listing some the numbers for their stores anymore? In the app. So I look it up on Google, and some stores have the little phone next to them, some do not. The one that I wanted to call does not. And so I called one that did have the phone number, and it went to a corporate number, not the store. And of course, I went through the, the whole system and got a customer service representative. They wanted my name and my email so they could start a little log of our conversation, the whole script, just to ask a question: Why does the new Cloud Macchiato have more calories when there are less ingredients? And I could not get an answer. 20 minutes I wasted on this issue trying to find out myself. Didn't get an answer. Tried to look in the app, didn't get an answer. Tried to call corporate, did not get an answer. So now I have an issue logged under my account that was escalated, and I will receive a callback from the escalation department because the customer service people did not have a way to find the answer in the next 1 to 2 days. Sometimes I just can't let things go, but maybe I should because I have more important things to do. Hopefully that's not you, but if it is Shut it down, go back to what you're supposed to be doing like I'm going to do right now, and have a great day. Catch you again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
