Around this time every year, even if I didn’t plan it, my frequency card would naturally fill up. Since I usually visit Starbucks solo, I’ve been to the store seventeen times since the frequency challenge began—like planting rice seedlings in a neat row on a paddy field. I guess that makes me pretty diligent. Lazy, yet dedicated. Not sure if that’s a good thing, though… 🤔
When ordering coffee and realizing I’ve collected all the frequencies, it felt like receiving an unexpected gift 🎁—I could choose a diary I liked and tuck it into my bag. I loved that feeling. Getting a surprise gift is already exciting, but having options too… I always picked a diary with plenty of blank pages and doodled in it during meetings. 🖋️
‘I’ll take this diary, please.’
I showed the frequency page on the app as I spoke.
‘Excuse me, did you make a reservation?’
She explained that starting this year, diary pickups require a reservation via the app, specifying the pickup date and store. Thanks to this change, I couldn’t grab it immediately and had to wait a week to finally get my diary. For Starbucks, it might be an evolution to solve several issues, but personally, it felt like the excitement had completely fizzled out. 😕
At home, I placed the diary on my desk and stared at the band labeled 2022 for a while. In ‘Blade Runner,’ a mysterious group launches a nuclear attack on the US, turning all of LA into a dark city, causing a global economic collapse and food shortages everywhere—that was 2022. Living in a time coinciding with dystopian sci-fi stories or movies felt oddly strange. Thankfully, no nukes have exploded yet, and the world economy, though wobbly, is still holding up. Let’s just hope it stays that way. 🌍✌️
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