Being Super Friendly Sure Has Its Perks

Our campus Starbucks is my land of milk and honey, holy ground for any sleepless NYU student. My reward to myself for anything from writing 20 pages of screenplay the night before, to just getting out of bed in the first place.

By Candy

The problem with this particular location however, is that other hundreds of other students (mostly freshmen) hold the same love affair as I do with the green goddess. But I have one advantage they don’t: Rhonda.

Rhonda knows my usual drink, and generally orders it for me on sight. The first time I brought my best guy friend (thank you Urban Dictionary for all my subtext needs) with me to my favorite haunt, she not only put both our orders in right away thus bypassing a line which went out the door, but also gave them to us for free.

As we collected our drinks surreptitiously from the counter, passing both the line that never ends and the cash register, said male friend stared at me in awe. “Jen, you are a ‘free stuff’ goddess.”

Since then I have never ceased to amaze him with the sheer amount of “getting over” I do in the places I frequently visit. Our dining halls, my favorite bar, even the food stand on the bottom floor of our arts school.

He swears it’s my womanhood that is the key, but what my (usually male) friends don’t understand is that just being a girl will get you nowhere, especially with other women. He also hasn’t taken note of the plethora of other places we go where I don’t get anything for free, but always know or make conversation with the people working there.

My secret is as follows:

Next time you’re at a store you visit every day, make conversation with one of the servers there. When they ask how you are, engage them. Make a commiserating comment about working, or compliment them on something: hair, make-up, or some extra piece of flair they have on their outfit. Working people, especially ones in the service industry, love and need distraction.

Most importantly? BE GENUINE about it, and never ever expect anything from them. If you end up getting free white mochas, awesome. If not, you’ll at least have a friendly face during your daily routine.

Who knows? But what I’ve found is that if you give a little in the way of friendliness, you get the same and a lot else in return.