<RANT> There are many things I love about America (this list in the Guardian covers about 40 of them) but one thing I have not adjusted to is the apparent inability of coffee shops to serve coffee in anything other than paper cups.
Every foreigner since Tocqueville, and no doubt others before him, has observed that Americans are a busy people, and serving coffee in a paper cup so you can take it with you is just to be expected.
But! If you do want to sit down and drink from a less-wasteful, nicer-to-handle ceramic cup, it would be nice if baristas did not act like the request was so unreasonable. The coffee just tastes better from a ceramic cup too. No doubt there are clever scientists working on this right now, but coffee in a paper cup still manages to take on some of the flavor.
A related bemusement in American coffee stores is when baristas apologize for taking two minutes (or three!) to make your espresso. Good coffee is meant to take a while to prepare. If you have to wait while the beans are ground that's a good sign.
More irritable [mostly] foreigners on this topic than I have time to link to.
</RANT>