When you walk into most Starbucks stores, they're loud, busy and full of tense people. This Starbucks in Malaysia isn't quite as hectic, though, as 75% of its staff is deaf and cuts out the shouty portion of your coffee experience.
The Starbucks is located in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, and the store is actually known for hiring deaf employees, with the help of a non-profit called Society of Interpreters for the Deaf.
If you're a customer who knows sign language, you'll fit right in with the cool clique, but for everyone else, they've incorporated a pretty cool, DMV-like system (not the slowness, thankfully) where you write your order on a menu card, get an order number, and wait for your number to pop up on a designated screen.
It's cool that this Starbucks makes an effort to employ deaf baristas, as in the US alone only 50.7 percent of the deaf community is employed, while in Malaysia, less than 1 percent of the deaf population was employed in 2007, according to the United Nations Development Program.
This store essentially eliminates the need to write down names on the cups, and might not be the worst system to incorporate worldwide. Anything that makes your morning less hectic, should be welcome.
