At my Starbucks, we’re lucky that we don’t have too many homeless people in the neighborhood. I do know that some homeless people camp out in stores and the partners have to kick them out all the time.
I opened the store this morning (on 2 hours sleep…i’m SUPER GIRL!!) and just shortly after we opened a young man no older that 20 came in and fell asleep on one of our soft chairs.
When our 6am partner came in, she said, “You know there’s a homeless guy sleeping in the lobby?”
And then I looked at the guy again and saw what she saw…he did kind of look homeless. He was carrying a lot of things, and his clothes were rather dirty.
The sleeping guy brought up a conversation about homeless customers. And as it turns out, we’ve got another set of regulars that are homeless. These man and woman that come in quite frequently ride their bikes everywhere and when the come to our store, they are usually there for five or six hours.
I had NO IDEA they were homeless, but now that my parnters have pointed that out to me, I can see the signs. They never buy drinks, they sit for hours…as if they didn’t have a home to go to. But in my defense, they are always 100% clean, and they have a laptop computer that they share. I don’t know very many homeless people with laptops!!
So, as it turns out I’m bad at eyeing a homeless person.
PS: Aside from our district manager stopping in to critique the store for a possible QASA visit in the coming days, I had a really good shift. If you don’t know what QASA is, I’ll explain in a later post. 🙂