Tall, Grande, Venti.
Why cant Starbucks use normal sizes. Maybe it gives you the extra push to pay $5 for a coffee. Tall and Grande sound like the largest, yet they are not. I am sure their evil marketing geniuses had fun creating these names. Every time I order, I speak in English and they have to correct me to their half Latin names. They look so shocked that I would even consider speaking in English.
Somethings need their names to be in other languages, such as Crouton which could be “Bread that we dropped on the ground and left to dehydrate, the sprinked garlic salt on them so they wouldnt taste like floor”. But I think Sizes are fairly straight forward.
However maybe Starbucks success is do to there evil size names, in which case this phenomenon may spread across the world, and I can wear a Venti sized shirt.
UPDATE:
Paul Rudd argues about Starbucks sizes in Rolemodels:
I know that the sizes are hard to decipher, but here is at least an explanation:
“Short” (8oz) was the original small when Starbucks was first starting out and “tall” (12oz) was the large. Makes sense, right? That can be understood by most people, I assume.
As time went on and Americans continued to be gluttonous, the 16oz “grande” was introduced. “Grande” means large in Italian and since a lot of people understood short and tall at the time, it probably made sense back then.
However, as time went on, feeding the need of even bigger sizes, Starbucks introduced the extra large drink, calling it “Venti,” which means twenty in Italian; fitting, since the Venti comes in a 20oz cup. At the same time they dropped the short off the menu, though it is still available.
It gets more confusing when it comes to iced drinks because the iced Venti is 24oz, which defeats the purpose of calling it Venti, since it’s not 20oz anymore.
If it’s any consolation, I still go in and order “medium” there and take the heat when the barista seems to get offended and says, “ummm, you mean GRANDE?!”
No, I mean the mid-sized…one in the middle…the 16oz…MEDIUM!!!