My faith in the common sense of my fellow Baton Rouge residents was recently bolstered after I learned that, of the 600 stores across the nation Starbucks^® is closing, nine are right here in the Capital City. Only San Diego and Las Vegas will see more closings.

I can only infer from such a decision that local coffee drinkers have opted to patronize local java purveyors over Starbucks more so than just about any other city. Either that, or they opened too many of them here in the first place.

Nah. On second thought, you can never have too many Starbucks. Just ask the retards who started SaveOurStarbucks.com.

The news of these closings does offer an interesting question: What becomes of nine shuttered Starbucks, some of which opened just the other day? Really, I think the contractors who built a couple of the stores were still finishing their punch lists when the decision came down.

We know what happens when fast-food places close in Baton Rouge. The buildings become homes for po-boy shops, payday loan places, or used car lots. If this trend carries over to the closed Starbucks, be prepared to see a 6-inch, gourmet po-boy go for $12.99, because that’s what it’ll take to cover the $55-per-square-foot rent.

Starbucks started out with a good business model by selling “premium” coffee at exclusive locations that were seen as sort of Bohemian resorts. Somewhere along the way, though, all that caffeine must have gone to their heads, and they started expanding faster than Kirstie Alley’s waistline.

They hit the scene like the Ruth’s Chris of coffee, only to try to make Starbucks locations more numerous than McDonald’s^®. I heard they were even thinking of putting up signs that read “Billions of Elitist A–holes Served.”

Sadly, exclusivity and marketing to the masses are incompatible. There’s a reason it’s Giorgio Beverly Hills, not Giorgio Bunkie.

Apparently, no one at their Seattle headquarters realized that great branding and slick marketing can sell only so many $5 cups of coffee to middle America. Sure, you can get away with that crap to an extent, especially when your menu resembles a foreign language, loaded with less-than-unintuitive beverage names developed by some ultra-hip, Stanford marketing graduate. Advertising experts know you can usually get pretentious people who are insecure about their social status to pay too much for something by employing fancy terminology. (Maybe that’s why they were overly optimistic about their potential for success in Baton Rouge.)

When you start going after the masses, though, you must remember one thing about Americans: We refuse to learn new languages. Whether it’s Spanish, HTML, or Starbuckese – with its “Frappuccino^®,” “Machiatto,” and “barista” – too many Americans recoil at the idea of having to expand their linguistic capabilities. It’s so bad, there are some parents who will not learn text-message codes, even though it could help them prevent their kid from hooking up with a sexual predator. Oh well, I guess they’re hoping Dateline gets to him first.

And even if you wanted to learn what the hell a venti^®is, you might not be inclined to ask the scowling person behind the counter. Sure, there are a few friendly faces at some Starbucks, but a good number of the employees are frustrated, aspiring writers/artists/musicians trapped in baristas’ bodies.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Gee, Jeremy, you’re more bitter about Starbucks than a plain shot of their espresso.” You’re probably right, but please allow me to explain how a Starbucks experience a few years ago left a bad taste in my mouth that no amount of artificial sweetener and skim milk can overcome.

Back in the day when there were just a couple of Starbucks in Baton Rouge, I stopped in for – get this – a cup of coffee. That’s right, a plain ol’ cup of joe. I didn’t need a big one, so I ordered the smallest size available, which, according to the menu, was a “tall.”

Since then, I’ve learned that other coffeehouses also feature a tall as their most diminutive portion. Despite the fact that I’ve gotten coffee at these places for years, I’ve never gotten accustomed to that. Instinctively, I still step up to the counter and start to ask for a “small.” Calling your smallest portion a “tall” must be some sort of strategic, marketing-psychology maneuver. That Stanford marketing grad must really get around.

Anyway, I asked the female barista why Starbucks would dub their small a “tall,” which most people would agree is proportionally counterintuitive. Thankfully, I had one of the nice ones working that day. In fact, she was so nice, she volunteered much more information and trade secrets than just the answer to my quirky query.

She explained that they previously had a size called a “short,” but they pulled it after some short people got mad. When I asked her if she was serious, she said she was.

I’m not making this up. This is an actual conversation that took place several years ago between a bona fide Starbucks barista and myself. If this girl was BS’ing me, she’s got a PhD in bullsh-t.

She then began to blow my mind by telling me about several other terms that were banned from her workplace jargon. What started as an innocent, playful joke about Starbucks terminology quickly turned into an unforgettable and insightful lesson about the bastion of political correctness that is Starbucks.

According to her, the word “skinny,” as in a drink ordered with skim milk, could not be uttered. The reasoning? It might anger fat people.

Similarly, the third member of the English language extricated from the coffeehouse’s dialogue was “dark.” The perverted reasoning behind that one is fairly self-evident.

Then she told me about the one that had recently caught her off guard just a few days before my visit. She said that, after spilling some liquid on the counter and requesting a rag to wipe it up, her manager scolded her. The reprimand wasn’t for the spill, though. It was for her use of the word “rag.” The supervisor informed her that the correct term for such an item is “towel.”

Now, that one, I can kind of understand. By using the word rag, a person runs the risk of pissing off members of two of the most potentially violent groups of people on the face of the earth – Arab terrorists and menstruating women.

When you consider how I feel about the pervasiveness of political correctness (if you don’t at this point, just keep reading this magazine), it should come as no surprise that I have a rather negative mind-set regarding Starbucks. And even if I didn’t mind such Orwellian language control, I would still find it annoying that a place selling overpriced, bitter coffee dares to nickel-and-dime me over wireless internet usage. At those prices, not only should the WiFi be free, but they should have someone there to help customers write their latest blog entries on Tibetan throat singing.

After my expository encounter with the informative employee, I concluded that their language policy made Starbucks the ideal target for an armed robber. He could knock off every one of them in Baton Rouge in a single night and never get caught, because the employees would never be able to give the police an accurate description of the perpetrator. The robber just has to be a black, anorexic midget wearing a do-rag.