The Viral Singing Starbucks Customer TikTok Video Is Not What You Think

A TikTok video of a woman singing to a Starbucks employee at a drive-thru has gone viral—but it's not what you think.

In the clip, the woman in the car starts singing: "Thank you for giving me this drink, you are pretty cute," to the Starbucks worker, but he shuts the drive-thru window on her and walks away.

The woman then says to the passenger in her car: "Did he just close that? I'm so embarrassed," as the passenger calls the employee rude.

The video has been watched more than 700,000 times on TikTok and more than 1.5 million times on Twitter—and sparked a conversation about people using service employees for social media content.

On Twitter, it was shared by Asia Chloe Brown, who wrote: "Service workers not tolerating people using them for content" in a tweet that has been liked more than 300,000 times.

Some social media users were angered by the clip. On Twitter @_RealShante wrote: "Human beings have no empathy, who wants to be at work doing their job and have to deal with people acting like idiots for clout."

Another Twitter user, @robingoodzmusic, posted: "The amount of pure bliss that overcame me when he shut the window is unmatched."

However, although there are plenty of social media challenges and trends that involve filming service workers in an attempt to produce viral content, this video is not what it seems.

In a follow-up TikTok, the woman—@tanjewest on the website—said: "Hey everyone, you actually won't believe what happened. I ended up banging on the drive-thru window and climbed through it. I did get him fired but now we're on our way to our first date. Thank you all for all the love."

She then turns the camera towards the Starbucks worker who is sitting in the car with her.

Even this is not entirely true. In a comment under the follow-up video, @tanjewest wrote: "He's my husband y'all but the video wasn't staged—we visited him at work and wanted to embarrass him so I started singing when I pulled up."

The woman, identified only by her first name Tanja, told Newsweek: "I actually uploaded that completely as a joke, not thinking people would take it seriously, but it blew up on like every platform and every comment is so negative.

"I can take hate pretty well so I'm fine, especially since I'm not actually ... singing to a barista and would never, but, man, I can't imagine how I'd be feeling if the video was real!"

Tanja's TikTok account is full of videos of herself and her husband, Ben, including one from October 2020 that has amassed 6.3 million views and 1.8 million likes. In the film, she says she accidentally sprayed a co-worker with pepper spray four years ago and is now married to him.

The video includes clips of Ben recovering from the pepper spray, followed by clips from their wedding.

In another video, Tanja pretends her husband is a homeless man she spotted on her walk and took into her home, before giving him a makeover and saving his life.

While the conversation about pranking service workers for social media content is valid, it would seem the only people getting pranked by Tanja are those watching her TikTok videos.

This story has been updated to add comments from Tanja.