Posted by TheShot on 10 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
Slate Magazine published an article today that posed an interesting question: Do coffee shops discriminate against women? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine. The crux of the article is economic research [PDF, 364kb] performed on eight Boston area cafés where the researcher compared the customer service times based on sex, age, race, drink type, [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 31 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Fair Trade
Today’s London Times published something of a book review of a new four-volume series, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (Markman Ellis, editor): Smell the coffee - Times Online. It’s a long-winded article. But compared to the British tolerance for long-winded, academic tomes (it clocks in at a whopping 1,840 pages), the article is a walk in the [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 30 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Home Brew
Today Earthtimes.org published an article on the evolving consumer coffee market in Vienna, Austria: Vienna’s coffee makers take on the convenience cup : Health. While Vienna is steeped in a long tradition of contemplative coffee-drinking in elegant cafés, modern trends such as espresso drinks, big international coffee chains, “to go” coffee, and home espresso machines [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 14 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
Props to the blog wcuk for one of the more thought-provoking posts I’ve read in a while: The Rise of Yuppie Foods « wcuk. It concerns the question of whether the diversification and specialization of common consumable staples — from coffee to wine to chocolate to the restaurants where we eat — is driven less [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 18 Jun 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society
Today New York Public Radio aired a story on the customers of independent coffeehouses and how some of them have become de facto “residents”: WNYC - News - Independent Coffee Shops: Problem Customers and Small Change. When is a café customer patronizing a business, and when are they just deadwood looking for a cheap hostel?
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 05 Jun 2007 | Tagged as: Barista, Starbucks
Today’s Chicago Daily Herald published a sort of barista confessional by Kerry Lester, detailing some of the professional oddities and insights of working in a Chicago Starbucks: Daily Herald | A former barista spills the beans. Whether it’s continually smelling of coffee, getting hit on by customers, learning how to live in a regularly over-caffeinated [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 04 Jun 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew
Unable to keep pace with the cancerous growth of Starbucks Coffee, Caribou Coffee, the nation’s #2 coffee specialty chain, seems to have opted for better customer experience as a competitive advantage, according to today’s The Detroit News: Caribou Coffee aims to be No. 1 in experience. (This is consistent with their point-of-sale kiosks announcement we [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 09 May 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society
Yesterday’s Greensboro, NC’s Yes! Weekly published a humorous article on the ten most common customer archetypes at any given coffee shop: Ten Best: Coffee shop archetypes. Though for SF, they’re missing the Prius-driving Fair Trade zombie child archetype.
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 26 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Fair Trade
Some of you may recall just how much the zombie children of the Fair Trade cult scare the bejeezus outta me. Ritual Coffee Roasters barista, Gabriel Boscana, wrote a much more tactful and civil approach to these single-issue customers in this month’s issue of Barista Magazine: FebMarch 07 - Certified Coffee Pusher. It was oddly [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew, Quality Issues
Today The Oregonian published an interview with David Rittenhouse, who over the past summer started the Portland Oregon Espresso Tasting Society (or P.O.E.T.S.): Opinions flow.
And you guessed it, his top tip for people ordering espresso…?:
If someone pours you a bad shot, don’t be afraid to ask for another one. Everyone has a flat shot sometimes; [...]
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