Somebody Is Always Going to Be Unhappy

We received a few comments on the blog about our "Insane Idea" post. And we've had numerous conversations about it in the shop.

Which is good, since getting feedback on ideas like this is the desired result.

Only thing is, the comments - both online and in person - are all over the place.

- People would be offended if we didn't try to talk to them about coffee.
- People would be annoyed if we did try to talk to them about coffee.
- People think we're shortchanging airpot coffee drinkers by applying this market index idea.
- People think we're shortchanging our coffee program by offering anything in airpots.
- People think we're indicting the quality of our single origins by offering a less expensive dark roast.
- People think offering a dark roast should be mandatory.

Which leaves us feeling empathetic to the White House Press Office. No matter which way we go, we're going to anger somebody.  Which is why you can't govern based on polls. Pick a route you think is best, execute it well and defend it. 

It's up to us to determine the best words to use to do explain what we're doing and why - an area where we apparently still need a lot of work.

On the posted comments we received a couple of useful analogies about sausages and beer which were offered to make the poster's point. They can also be tilted to make our points.  Whether we agree with the points being made is irrelevant, we really appreciate the time and thought that goes into these comments. The whole idea is to engage folks in the discussion and to get feedback.  So to everyone who's chimed in, thanks!

But the most interesting thing to us is how much of what we post is parsed and interpreted in ways we didn't expect and certainly didn't mean - again, not too dissimilar from a contentious White House press briefing. 

The airpots, for example.  They're not going away.  We've never said they were going away.  We spent time and energy earlier this year improving the quality of our airpot brew methodology.  Yet there's still an impression that we want them to go away.  Not true.

What we can't afford to do is put single origins in airpots at all hours.  That's expensively wasteful, so we offer our single origins custom-brewed by the cup.  We think that's reasonable.

The longer we're in business, the more we realize that observations we make that we didn't expect to be taken personally are, indeed, taken personally.  We're working on improving how we communicate our thoughts. 

That we're extremely open and transparent about our thought processes makes us a bigger target than a company that continually spouts only well-crafted marketing verbiage or one that says nothing at all.  We're constantly inviting comment and we're willing to accept it's not all going to be favorable.  And that's OK. Sometimes we really are wrong in our assumptions and need to rethink an idea.  Your feedback helps (caveat: we neither respond to nor seriously consider stuff that's sent anonymously).

Comments

[Brad Fisher]

I'd be willing to bet that most of your commuter customers for dark roast have no idea that you're pondering whether you should talk to them about their coffee. Nor do they care much, one way or the other. They are thinking of your business the same way they think of Sbux, or maybe even Sheetz, when they walk into your store. You might try some of that 'well-crafted marketing verbiage' to let them know that there's a difference and invite them to find out about it. It works.

[The Onocoffee]

The one major thing that I've discovered in business is that it is much harder to take away than to give. Meaning, if you've been offering a 16z coffee for many years and then one day you take that away to "focus on coffee", the backlash will be considerable.

[Neil Oney]

Hi Rich,

I'm wondering if you're going to take differentials into account? The C price may be $1.80 right now, but If you're serving a dark roast Colombian, the actual price might be $2.30 because the Colombian government inflates the prices.

What would be really cool is if you had a live stream of the futures price, so the price fluctuates throughout the day.