billboard1

Nationwide, Japan Starbucks locations appear to be telling foreign customers to learn Japanese or risk anaphylactic shock.

Dear Valued Customers: Starbucks Japan is entirely unconcerned with your health and safety if you can’t read Japanese, is the message some foreign guests took away from new signage appearing in Starbucks locations all over Japan recently.

The sign, which reads, “To our customers who have food allergy,” in English, followed by a large block of Japanese text, is easy to overlook for most. But for non-Japanese-speaking customers who do actually have food allergies, the notice must seem like mean-spirited teasing at best, a flat-out declaration that Starbucks Japan doesn’t really care about its foreign customers at worst.

Amusingly, some guests report that scanning the QR code also takes you to a Japanese-only webpage…

As Japanese companies go, Starbucks Japan is, unsurprisingly, one of the more Anglo-friendly chains, which makes the oversight—along with the slight Engrish-ness of the text—all the more uncharacteristic. The menus at Starbucks Japan are, shrewdly, printed in multiple languages, which allows international guests to simply point or gesture to get their order across, while simultaneously avoiding the McDonald’s pitfall of having a separate English menu—the summoning of which can be insulting to foreign customers who do speak Japanese. Starbucks Japan’s care in accommodating foreign guests, then, would seem to go quite a way, but stop just short of guaranteeing your visit won’t literally kill you.

For what it’s worth, while the language snafu amused enough foreigners to appear in the annals of the venerated engrish.com, the actual Japanese text isn’t nearly as important as you might think, basically amounting to instructions that customers with food allergies should discuss menu options with a barista when ordering. That’s common sense and something we imagine people with potentially life-threatening food allergies do instinctively anyway.

Somewhat ominously, though, there is also a warning that Starbucks can’t guarantee your drink will be allergen free anyway, so don’t come to them if drinking one of their lattes causes your head to swell to twice its normal size…

Source: yurukuyaru.com
Feature image: Twitter/@harryhenrysmall