If there's one thing Starbucks is notorious for, it's misspelling people's names. And now, it appears even Academy Award-winning actresses aren't safe from the mix-ups.
On Monday night, Helen Hunt—an actress who has starred in dozens of films since launching her career in the 1970s—tweeted a photo of a cup from the coffee chain, claiming an overconfident barista had mistaken her for Jodie Foster.
To add insult to injury, the barista even spelled the name Jodie incorrectly.
Starbucks quickly responded to Hunt on Twitter, apologizing to actress for the mistake while making a feeble pun on the film As Good as It Gets—the romantic comedy Hunt won an Oscar for in 1997. Still, this isn't the first time the actress has been confused with Foster. In 1994, Hunt told David Letterman she was often mistaken for Foster when she was getting her start as an actress.
"My life has changed a little bit," she said. "I'm recognize now for being who I actually am rather than, 'I went to college with you,' or 'Did you used to date my cousin?' or, 'Are you Jodie Foster?' which I got for a long time."
Still, two decades later, it looks like Hunt's Academy Award doesn't carry much weight inside a coffee shop. And while receiving a cup with the wrong name on it can certainly be frustrating at times, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Starbucks mobile app—a new program that prints out drink orders rather than relying on interactions between customers and baristas—has actually made some patrons nostalgic for handwritten labels.
“I think I would still prefer it to be handwritten. Sometimes the barista would include a smiley face on the cup," Roque Devine, a Starbucks customer in Monterey Bay, California, told the paper last week. “It makes that trip to Starbucks more personal.”
[via Wall Street Journal, CBS News]