CUSTOMER LEAVES BIG TIP FOR STARBUCKS BARISTAS

Shop regular drops off card with $400 for workers to share

SAN MARCOS

Baristas at a San Marcos Starbucks shop got a heartwarming surprise this week, when a regular customer dropped off a holiday card with a $400 tip for employees.

“He’s a really nice guy,” said Gillian Parker, 22, a barista at the Starbucks shop in Nordahl Marketplace. “We all really enjoy and look forward to seeing him in the store. He came in and gave a card to the shift lead who was on duty at the time. He said, ‘Here, this is for all of you, but don’t open it until I leave.’ ”

When employees opened it, the envelope contained a written thank-you note with $400 — enough for a $20 tip for every barista who works at the store, with $40 left over, she said. Although Parker has worked for two years at Starbucks in San Marcos, and while in college at the University of California Irvine, she hadn’t seen any act of generosity like that before.

“I was pretty shocked,” Parker said. “That was never something that I would have expected, and never something that I had experienced before. With everyone being in hard places recently, it was such an amazing gesture, and really made all of us feel really appreciated.”

Parker said she graduated from UC Irvine in June amid the pandemic and, like many new graduates, has been making the best of circumstances since then, working part time at Starbucks and tele-working additional hours for a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

Although she said she feels safe with the shop’s