A Barista's Ballad: Fired for a Starbucks Song

Apparently, serving coffee wasn’t exactly this guy’s cup of tea. Now, he won't have to anymore.

In the following video, which is making the rounds on social-media sites, former Starbucks barista Christopher Cristwell delivers an amusingly bitter and profanity-laden score about his daily routine at the coffee house in Chowchilla, California. He leaves no stone unturned, singing about the fat white lady who orders the skinny vanilla latte, the amount of fat in the coffee cake, and what he wishes he could draw on customers’ cups.

And that’s all in the first minute of the song.

Not all that surprisingly, Starbucks' executives stumbled across the video, and even less surprisingly, they weren’t altogether pleased. The Chowchilla managers sent Cristwell packing earlier this week and, to our delight, he responded by whipping out his guitar and dropping another little ditty about his firing.

This time, though, at least in the introduction, the now shirt-wearing lyricist seemed genuinely remorseful, apologizing for offending listeners and declaring his love for his manager, his coworkers and even Starbucks customers. For a fleeting moment, it appeared Cristwell had had a change of heart.

Then he started singing, and the racial observations and customer-directed venting quickly resumed.

While it’s undoubtedly one of the funniest, this isn’t the first public #@&%-you we’ve seen result in or stem from pink slips. Most recently, former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur left us with this video gem after his show was canceled. One year earlier, a JetBlue flight attendant went ballistic over a plane’s intercom and bolted using the inflatable emergency exit slides.

Then there’s our all-time favorite incident, when, in 2008, a hedge fund manager revealed his true feelings about the industry in a farewell letter, in which he blames the nation’s dependence on foreign energy on marijuana bans.

Cristwell, we’re impressed. Very impressed. But we’re still waiting for someone to top that letter.

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J.D. Harrison is an assistant editor at Portfolio.com.