The Mysterious Starbuck’s “Shorty”
I went to starbucks once and a friend ordered a short cappuccino. I was bewildered…the cup was smaller than any Starbucks coffee I’d ever seen. The “short” size is not even on the menu! Was I dreaming? No. The “short” size is actually very hush-hush, but why?
The drink in question is the elusive “short cappuccino”—at 8 ounces, a third smaller than the smallest size on the official menu, the “tall,” and dwarfed by what Starbucks calls the “customer-preferred” size, the “Venti,” which weighs in at 20 ounces and more than 200 calories before you add the sugar.
The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible.
The short size actually gives you a better quality coffee than the tall, grande, or venti:
The problem with large cappuccinos is that it’s impossible to make the fine-bubbled milk froth (”microfoam,” in the lingo) in large quantities, no matter how skilled the barista. A 20-ounce cappuccino is an oxymoron.
Read the rest of the article from Slate on MSN to get a better idea of the motivation behind keeping this product so secret.