Starbucks is known for its coffees, macchiatos, and pink drinks, but in February 2022, the brand added a new highlight to its popularity—an act of kindness. At a Starbucks branch in Corpus Christi, Texas, baristas stepped up to help an 18-year-old girl they thought might be in trouble. Her mother shared the story on social media, and it quickly went viral, with people praising the coffeehouse.
Image Source: Starbucks Cafe logo at Rua dos Clerigos on March 23, 2024, in Porto, Portugal. (Photo by Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
It was a Saturday evening when this teen girl was studying by herself in the coffee shop. A man entered and began acting strangely. He quickly became loud and animated. He was speaking fairly loudly. Eventually, the employees felt concerned for the teenager as the man began talking and interacting with her, as her mother, Brandy Selim Roberson, described to 10 Tampa Bay.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Olly
So, the baristas flung forward to help the girl. While a female barista served the girl an extra hot chocolate, saying that someone had forgotten to pick it up, she slipped a secret note scribbled on the paper cup. “Are you okay? Do you want us to intervene? If you do, take the lid off the cup,” the handwritten note read. The girl looked sideways to find the entire team of baristas staring at her, intent on helping her if she needed.
Although the Texas student didn’t ask for their intervention, she immediately spilled the details of the happening to her mom as soon as she got home. Brady then took to Facebook to share this on a post, currently hidden due to privacy reasons. "She was holding the cup and knew that I would love that someone did that for her," Brandy told TODAY, "It made me feel so grateful that the Starbucks employees were watching out for her. As a mom, that is my worst fear that something would happen to my child and nobody would be there to help."
Adding to this, Brady expressed her sentiments to The New York Post, saying, “This reaffirms my faith in humanity. Maybe just seeing this story, others... if given the opportunity to say something or turn away, they would say something."
Since then, the story has been doing rounds on social media, especially on X. People are praising the cafe baristas for displaying this sweet gesture. “This is one of my best friends' daughter. I’m so glad they cared so much. She’s a very special young lady,” said @limhumphrey on X.
@itsjamesherring commented, “Kudos to the Starbucks barista who checked in on a teenage girl by writing a discreet message on her cup!”
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Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.