paulsdatter is trish

“Why does it really matter that Coffee Kids has folded?”

I’ve heard this sentiment over the past 24 hours or so…interspersed with the other side that expresses sadness with a tinge of hopelessness thrown in.

I represent the latter of the two responses, and not because I was ever intimately involved in the specific causes and/or projects of Coffee Kids (CK), but because I see a general shift in the way we as an industry are supporting organizations like CK, and I’m less than impressed by our motivations.

Fewer and fewer (note here that I am writing an opinion and have no actual numbers or stats to report like a journalist would) companies are interested in pure altruism and philanthropy. Coffee Kids and others like them rely on donations of money…no strings attached, no long lists of requirements first, no having a say in a project that can be manipulated to serve my specific value chain…just plain money. We used to give money without these kinds of strings attached. We used to put our trust in the people doing the good works. I dare say we still put our trust in those individuals who sit on the boards and work as the small underpaid staff, but we are not writing checks. Corporations don’t want to do that anymore. Something there is dying. Can you feel it, or is it just me?

These days we not only have corporations (not just in coffee) that create their own “NGO” departments, but we have companies whose unabashed business model is based on contrived altruism. They make boatloads of money based on the idea that they are giving back. I personally can find no joy in supporting the making of American millionaires knowing that they appropriated the messaging from real organizations that do non-profit work.

Back in the day (my entrance to the business was right around the same time as the inception of CK) coffee companies went out and set up coffee cupping labs for producing partners without writing a blog about it…okay that was before blogs, but you get me. We used to band together as an industry and write some damned checks to the organizations that helped producers and entire communities – whether they turned out the best specialty lots or not. I even wrote  tiny checks from my personal account when I felt compelled…sometimes anonymously.

What do we want to be about? Who are we anymore?

She perfects her bruises with

frosted plum

night plum

stone violet

Thoughtful words from my good friend Peter Giuliano. In California, we have a lot of things on the ballot to deal with. This Prop 37 has found wide support from most of my friends and family. Still, we have suffered under some pretty badly written laws in the past. Here Peter says we can agree to agree - which is encouraging even if this law won't fix it all...

American Sushi Cartoon - Lucky Peach Magazine by cgfan on Flickr.

Along with any extremely detailed tool -such as the official SCAA cupping form- we naturally get a lot more questions…and sometimes we get different solutions or interpretations about how to use the tool. Maybe this can and should be expected. Sometimes people decide this is damn good sure proof that the tool sucks. But I don’t believe that. I think the dialectical discussion is well worth the time and energy. It is for me, anyway. If you don’t like it, you can easily tune out and just use the tools you like, and I have NO problem with that.

So that said, let's get into a little thing that recently came up about the UNIFORMITY spots on the SCAA form.

Q: If ALL the cups in the set are defective, doesn’t that mean it’s uniform?

A: Nope. If all cups are defective, there is a slim chance, if any, that the defect is uniform in all cups. You might have ferment in all cups, but are you trying to tell me that all the beans were consistently and uniformly fermenty? I’m saying it’s highly unlikely, so if you’re just going to the literal mandate to find “sameness” in uniformity, I’m saying nope.

But besides that, that is not the purpose of the uniformity category- and this gets into my (and some other cuppers’) interpretation of the form. If all cups are wrong, then they are out. If you find four cups wrong, they are out and only one is “uniform”.

Yesterday, I posted a picture on the Instagrm showing the discussion during the International Coffee Professional’s Book Club Meeting in San Francisco. It was a great meeting and we talked about a bunch of the usual stuff surrounding customer service. We all still seem to have the perception that we, as an industry, suck at customer service. We either think that about ourselves, because of some vague sense that we are inadequate or overworked…or we think about other coffee experiences we have had out there tasting at various shops…because we all do that a lot…taste other people’s coffee and judge the experience from the consumer’s perspective.

So I posted this picture, and as some like to do, comments were offered. This is, incidentally, one of the great things about Instagrm. (Somehow I love the comments on Instagrm, but I can’t stand them on blogs-I digress.) One comment was from one of my favorite people, and one of the great customer service focusers among us, Matthew Williams of Stumptown, Portland. He just wrote simply, “hospitality>customer service”. To which I replied, “Sometimes it’s not, though”. Let me explain with an example of how customer service can be>hospitality.

My bank is good. Or rather, it’s relatively okay and functions like most of the other banks you might know. But there is not that much a bank can do for me to differentiate itself from any other that I could choose. They offer basically the same services. In response, someone in management at the bank has decided to win me over with hospitality by becoming excessively welcoming whenever I come in there for a quick transaction. The manager typically hollers from her desk as I enter, “HELLOOOO! Good to see you! A teller will be right with you!” That’s cool, I guess, but I know the drill. I need to wait my turn in line. No big deal.

When I get to the teller, I get it again, “HI! Good to see you! My name is Larry! I don't think we’ve met!” Sometimes he’ll even hold out his hand so I need to shake it. Nice I guess, but I do actually think I’ve met him before, and I’ve shaken his hand. Trouble is, he doesn’t remember. No big deal, but on one occasion I was in the middle of counting out a stack of bills for deposit and had to stop so I could shake his awaiting hand. Awkward.

So then I thought about customer experiences in coffee where the same kind of awkwardness is enacted in the name of hospitality. Especially with coffee, we have a good portion of customers (excuse me, “guests”) who just need to duck in for a quick coffee and be on their way. Sometimes we need to be more concerned with completing a satisfying customer service transaction and less about all the extras.