Eventual consistency explained with Starbucks coffee

How do you explain eventual consistency to a novice?  You tell them, "Have you been to Starbucks? Yes? - Well, it's like this, only for databases."

That is a favorite example. I thought that an illustration would help, so here it is.

The orders do not go through all phases in sequence, but eventually, you get it. There may be false starts, wrong order, etc., and this is how NoSQL databases work as well.

One more architectural principle that Starbucks illustrates is decoupling. The workers at Starbucks communicate with each other through messages, encoded on a cup. Moreover, this message is hardware (cup) based, so it does not get. Decoupling is important for scaling: you can have two baristas, for example.