“Vanessa’s having her usual,” the Starbucks’ baristo shouted.

I’m not much of a Starbucks patron. For one thing, I don’t drink coffee. But this morning, before heading downtown for the day, I didn’t have time to make breakfast, and I had a Starbucks gift card in my purse. I had a vision that there was a cinnamon scone with my name on it tilted coyly on display in their glass pastry case. It was drizzled with overly-sweet white icing.

“Vanessa’s having her usual.”

The baristo, a tall thin man in his early twenties, wearing a black logo decorated baseball cap, repeated the order. He called down the counter to two other crew members, two women, who were even younger. They were similarly decked out in black slacks and long-sleeved button down shirts, black baseball caps and green cotton aprons.

The girl closest to the coffee machine, with a fresh from the farm complexion and four piercings in one ear lobe, giggled then pulled out the appropriately sized cardboard cup.

“This is the second day in a row that you remembered her name now, isn’t it?” she teased her co-worker.

“Yes,” he replied as she started the process of filling, frothing and flavoring Vanessa’s standing order.

“I have a buffer of about 720 names,” he went on. “I am sure the names of most of the people we see all the time are in there. Somewhere.”

I confess I was pretty impressed with his recall. When the other girl rang up my order and deducted today’s purchase from the balance on my gift card, I didn’t even think about the more impressive demonstration of information retention. How did the other girl remember what Vanessa’s usual was? Did she like her coffee strong or weak? Creamy? Black? Sweet?

Vanessa, a short thirty-something with black and blond streaked, spiked hair, started fumbling through her handbag looking for her wallet. The big, black leather number would barely have qualified as acceptable overhead storage according to any airline’s policy. She seemed happy. She looked up at the three servers and smiled. She must have been happy that the baristo remembered her name.

Calling people by their name is an incredibly welcoming gesture, a small way to say, “Yes, you matter.” I know that when I do appointment-setting or other types of professional phone work, I always make a point of repeating the contact’s name. Even when I am just leaving a message, after I leave my phone number, I add “John,” or “Lorraine,” or “Billy Bob,” … “I’m looking forward to talking with you.”

Seeing this short scene at the mother of all corporate controlled experience providers was really heartening. And it wasn’t even about me. It wasn’t even my “usual” that everyone seemed to know. But it got me thinking that if I did drink coffee, if I did visit a specific café practically every day, like Vanessa, I imagined how happy I would be to be remembered.

Hearing someone remember your name is no small thing.