Any good Canadian will tell you to go to Tim Horton’s for a coffee but we all have our personal preferences and we may decide that Starbucks is more our thing. One main thing to learn about this chain, aside form the long names of their beverages, is that their sizes are different: you don’t get to choose among the usual small, medium or large coffee! Your small cup is now a tall: no problem here, since we all know what that means. But your next size is venti. Most people don’t know that ‘venti’ is nothing but the number twenty in Italian and it refers to the amount of coffee (20 ounces) you will receive! ‘Grande’ is once again Italian and it means big. The latest addition to the family is ‘Trenta’, just another amount referring to the thirty ounces of coffee you will drink. As, a joke, I normally says that basically you get to choose between large, larger and largest size of coffee!!
You may be wondering why Starbucks, that serves coffee that most Italians would consider a bucket of dirty water, uses Italian names for its sizes: my guess is that their intent is to hint at Italian coffee, a marketing strategy that is not uncommon in North America, and to convince their customers that they’re getting the same quality they would find in an Italian café. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s true!!
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