Coffee Queues, and a brief pre-Valentine's warm-up rant

I met a friend for coffee this afternoon, and I jest not when I say that it took considerably longer to acquire the brewed beans than it did to consume them. Blackwells (to name and shame) has contained within a notoriously busy coffee shop, and you'd have thought that on a Sunday they would manage to have more than two members of staff available, one whose mastery of the English language was so appalling she eventually quit taking orders and resorted to being in charge of Emptying The Dish Washer. This whole 'coffee culture' we have going on, apparently something to assist in making the average human being more sociable but, in my view, achieving the opposite effect. Whereas in previous days a woman would wander around to her friend's house to have a cosy chat in the parlour over a pot of tea, where one's intimate thoughts can be discussed in such a safe haven, we now launch ourselves into the bustle of a cafe where we can be overheard, 'checked out', and generally be 'moved on' if we spend too long clogging up the place. How is this positive? How? I'm not personally a coffee-drinker, but I understand from those better informed that the genuine Coffee Appreciator would never set foot in the likes of Starbucks unless dragged kicking and screaming. So why do we do it? Because we're expected to? It gets us through the day? Honestly, it is a ghastly, impersonal experience that seems wholly unnecessary to me.
Moving onto my first rant of the season regarding Valentine's Day (I predict many more to come). I detest the fact that virtually every shop I enter right now immediately welcomes me with some suitably hideous display of hearts, roses and - inexplicably - teddy bears, all with ridiculously unnecessary price tags just to crank my blood pressure that little bit higher. Valentine's Day is commercialised hell, as good a marketing scam as the 'coffee catch-up chat' now I come to think about it. Yes, I know what you're all thinking: bitter Jane, disliking Valentine's because once more the day looms large ahead of her without a hope in hell of being, oh I don't know, whisked off to Paris. It isn't that (and nor is it that I'm generally a practical sort of lass on occasions like this, and mid-week dashes at ridiculously over-inflated prices don't fit in with work schedules anyway), it is just that I hate the way it is thrust in my face. Catch 22 situation: if you don't have a Valentine, then for an entire day you are basically a social pariah, and if you do then you are forced by the cursed media to remortgage your house in order to afford an appropriate volume of gifts.
Seriously, the wrapping paper from the Christmas presents is still in the bin...
The one positive: at least I can be fairly sure to get rapid service in a coffee shop on Valentine's Day, as everybody will be focussing on Getting Ready To Go To Dinner. That is, assuming that the girl serving me doesn't have her mind equally as distracted and does manage to acknowledge my existence.