Starbucks Discourse

Discourse is something that nearly every community has and engages in, but is something that is often never analyzed by the community. Within each community, there are those that have authority over the discourse that occurs within the community. To have authority over text, to me, means to feel experienced with the discourse and to understand how to communicate with others in the community. To explain authority in discourse communities, Klaas describes her discourse skills as “soft skills,” or to be able to ask questions, consequently gaining knowledge. This process of asking and learning is the only way to effectively allow newcomers to gain discourse authority in any community. The majority of my experience with authority over discourse has been at my workplace. I work as a barista for Starbucks, and have for a few months. My first month was really difficult, because being a barista requires you to learn a lot in a short period of time, such as, complicated coffee terminology, how to make drinks, and how to interact with our

While I had worked customer service jobs before, nothing compared to the communication with customers in this job. As shown in the last example, our customers can be very pretentious at times. In the three months I have been working for Starbucks, I have met more difficult customers than I have in my entire time working customer service. I have met customers who have treated me poorly because I was a confused, new employee and I have met customers who have treated me poorly because they felt inclined to more authority than me. While I have to deal with many awful customers, the enjoyable customers that I get to meet and interact with make this job completely worth the aggravation. Working at a coffee shop, we have many regulars, and it is interesting to memorize their drink order while simultaneously learning about them and their