How Many Years In Prison Should A Barista Get For Screwing Up This Man's Order?

He wants to lower the minimum wage and make weed illegal again.

This weekend, the New York Post— which conservatives still whining about the Hunter Biden laptop story will eagerly remind you is a venerated old paper originally founded by Alexander Hamilton and definitely not just a trashy tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch — published an op-ed from restaurant critic Steve Cuozzo, ever-so-cleverly titled "Let’s be blunt — legal weed is turning New York workers into zombies." 

Cuozzo argues, with what we can assume is a straight face, that someone screwed up his Starbucks order one time and that in order to prevent such abominations in the future, people must be sent to prison for smoking pot and people who work at places like Starbucks must be paid too little to afford such vices to begin with. Or, you know, their rent.

The Big Apple is now the Big Blunt.

Not just because decriminalized marijuana led to proliferating mayhem in the five boroughs.

This link, I am going to need to point out, goes to another article in the Post about how there was a shooting outside of a smoke shop, which the author of said article seems to think relates directly to marijuana being legalized, as well as to first dibs on licenses being given to those who previously served time for pot-related offenses. This perhaps seems reasonable if one's only familiarity with the drug comes from Reefer Madness and the D.A.R.E. program, but probably not to anyone who has ever actually smoked weed at any point in their life.

Not just because stinky smoke hangs everywhere , seeping into subway cars and even Broadway theaters — the acrid odor I detected in the crowded men’s room of the Majestic Theatre a few weeks ago was not from “The Phantom of the Opera” smoke machine.

It’s also because of a forbidden-to-utter truth, in an age where raising the minimum wage ever higher has become mantra — namely, a license to get high has turned service employees into zombies.

Well, clearly it's not that "forbidden-to-utter," given that a major newspaper (founded by Alexander Hamilton, mind you!) has paid this man money to write up an entire column on the subject.

I’ve lived in the city nearly all my life.

I never had to repeat my highly complex Starbucks order — a “tall” coffee — three times to get a response from the bummed-out barista, the way I do now.

Oh, the humanity! Imagine, standing there at the counter, helplessly saying the words "a tall coffee" three times in a row, with no one even bothering to call 911 and knowing that if someone did, that the barista would likely not even serve a day in jail! What have we come to as a society?

Bob Dylan’s lyric, “Everybody must get stoned,” is now apparently in the employees’ handbook at most every place requiring customer interaction.

Yes, that seems very likely to be true.

My friend Shelley Clark, a restaurant consultant, observed, “Too often, any question or request is met with a vacant look and a very much by-rote ‘no problem.’”

That’s actually nice compared to the hostile glares I get for interrupting stay-out-of-my-space reveries.

And what is the answer to this problem, according to Steve Cuozzo?

It’s time to lower the minimum wage.

Why not, when many workers in stores, restaurants, dry cleaners — you name it — have turned hopelessly stunad , as the Italian people say.

I don't know, maybe so they can live closer than two hours away from their jobs?

The word means dumb, but sounds eerily similar to so many service employees’ doped-up conditions.

It's also usually used to mean "an ignorant or stupid person," such as the kind of stunad who would actually suggest paying people less than they need to live and eat, just on the off chance that it might mean that he wouldn't have to repeat his order a couple times. The term actually comes from the word "stonato" which means "out of tune," like how one can be so up their own ass that they are entirely "out of tune" with what $15 an hour gets you when you live in the most expensive city in the country.

Though to be fair, we've got some other words that might better apply to someone like Steve Cuozzo — strampalato, balordo, stugatz, balzano, maleducato, cafone, sfigato, cattivo, scortese, cazzo, faccia di minchia, pignolo, cretino, rompipalle etc. etc. It's a beautiful language in which there are many, many words to describe someone like Steve Cuozzo.

Did GrubHub bring you General Tso’s chicken when you ordered chicken burritos?

Blame the delivery guys’ favorite hangouts — e.g., the “Smoke & Draft” shop across from my building on First Avenue at East 75th Street, where a sidewalk knife fight recently sent two of them to the hospital.

Yes, because of the weed they were all just too busy getting in stoned knife fights to get your order right. That seems very plausible.

I gave a guy at Pret a Manger a $20 bill for an $8 cup of soup. I asked for a bag.

He took the $20 and promptly forgot the soup, my change, the bag — and me. He wandered off, inexplicably waving my Andrew Jackson like a flag, until I appealed to his colleagues.

And what should the appropriate prison sentence for this be?

I haven’t seen so much pot-induced lethargy since my Vietnam-era college days, when so many fellow students were high that their panicked weed-flushing during a rumored police raid overwhelmed the campus pipes.

Now, our whole pot-pickled city is that campus.

Except not at all, because no one would have to overwhelm said pipes because they wouldn't have to be afraid that they would spend the rest of their lives in prison if the cops found their weed. Or as they said in those days, "grass."

At Upper East Side gourmet food emporium Agata and Valentina, one cashier was “so out of it, staring into space while people waited in line,” a bank executive who’s a regular customer there told me.
“She forgot to give me my change. She closed the register. I had to wait for someone to come with the dreaded key. After ten minutes for a 30-second transaction, she didn’t even apologize.”
Responding to a tweet I posted about discombobulated workers, a follower wrote to say that “The woman running the service desk” at a major Sunset Park auto dealer “was clearly high … had no idea what was going on. Lost my car twice during routine service.”

So like ... 20 years in prison for that, ideally?

Real estate man Jordan Cohn tweeted, “I just had a restaurant server lose my credit card. Yep, gone, never to be seen again. My best guess is that it went into the trash by accident.”

Our “progressive” pols are throwing our city into the trash — and it’s no accident.

By, again, not throwing people in prison for literal decades for smoking pot.

The minimum wage in New York City is $15 an hour. The average rent with a roommate in the city is $1,559. This would leave someone making that amount and paying that amount with about $1000 left each month to pay for food (also very expensive these days), utilities and other basic necessities — which doesn't actually leave all that much over to buy bags of weed with. Still, if Cuozzo is upset now, imagine how peeved he'd be if there were literally no one working any of these jobs to begin with, because of how they were all either in prison or living too far away from New York City to work at a Starbucks there.

To be fair, I do not live in New York City! One could reasonably say that, being that I do not live there, I cannot possibly imagine his strife. But I do live in Chicago, where weed is also legal, where the minimum wage is $15. 40 , and where most of us pay significantly less in rent than most New Yorkers do. Some of us even live in two-bedroom apartments that cost less than the average rent for a roommate in New York City (me, I am one of those people) — and I can honestly say I have not noticed such a phenomenon. It's almost as if it's not actually a thing.

Even if it were, I'd like to think that I am able, as a normal human being, able to recognize the difference between minor inconveniences and crimes deserving of an actual prison sentence. I would also happily repeat my order at a coffee shop 12 times if it meant the person behind the counter made a living wage, but that is probably just because, unlike Steve Cuozzo, I am not a giant pezzo di merdo. See how that works?

[ New York Post ]

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