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Permalink Reply by Kevin Ayers on June 4, 2010 at 11:50am

Beautiful, I never thought of that use for my portable refractometer.


Jared Rutledge said:

dear nick cho: thanks for owning this dude

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickcho/4647843823/

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Permalink Reply by zack burnett on June 4, 2010 at 11:57am

I agree 100%. The guy has a blatant agenda and Esquire magazine has published it as an opinion piece. I think getting pissed off and heckling the guy is probably the wrong move though. This article should motivate the individuals in the industry that care about the quality of coffee to stay ahead of the curve. Criticism can just piss you of or it can make you reexamine your self and become better. As soon as you think everything you are doing is perfect your business becomes stagnant and irrelevant which is what seems to be happening in his case.

Mike Sabol said:

I think Marshall is hitting the nail on the head. These "articles" are actually marketing propoganda aimed at re-positioning the third wave coffee shops as faddish also-rans. La Colombe has been in business a good while and rode the initial wave when Starbucks exploded back in the early 90's. They were able to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by saying that Starbucks was "Street Coffee" and that they were "Culinary Coffee" and were able to treat the bean in a fashion that Starbucks could not because of it's approach to the marketplace. La Colombe has been working hard to maintain that distinction along with the handful of other roasters who are still in business from that time period. And then Stumptown comes along. The fact of the matter is that the new roasters are beginning to get into the big institutional accounts, like hotels, that are really profitable and that have also served as the bread and butter for that previous generation of roasters. When they start losing accounts to the third wave roasters then they have to start doing something about it. What I think is really interesting is the fact that Esquire is running the pieces. We've all heard the critiques of the "Hipster Douchbags" a million times before and nothing much has come of it. But now a big national media outlet is targeting "Hipster Douchbags". I bet in six months Time magazine will run a story about how America is falling out of love with the "Third Wave".

Opinions of Mr. Carmichael's motivations not withstanding, I think there is a cautionary lesson to gather from the articles. For the sake of argument lets pretend that there is this "fad" that TC was poking at. Well, what if you own a coffee shop that is based on that fad? You are thinking that you're "all about the coffee" but in actuallity your success is based on riding the third wave. Talking the talk, walking the walk, with the beards, tats and everything. What are you going to do when you become the target of derision in an SNL sketch. A living cariacature. And you thought you were "all about the coffee". If there is a fad and the winds of fortune change then the rug will be pulled from your feet and you will be out of business.

For those of us old enough to remember the Dot-com build up and subsequent explosion there are some interesting parallels. In the dot-com days everybody was talking about the promise of the internet and the comming revolution of the hyper-connected world. Many companies were build on trying to race full speed into that unknown and were able to raise a massive amout of debt in selling their vision but were never able to generate any revenue, let alone profit. The third wave is similar in that we hear an awfull lot about the promise of the coffee and it's connection to the people at the origin and just how really awesome and super fantastic coffee, as a philosophy, is but the shops that talk about this have slow service, because each pull of espresso must be just so and each cup of coffee must be individually brewed. And the baristas will tell a customer "No" to perfectly reasonable requests. Which is bad customer service. That customer who was told "no" will never go back again and never recomend your cafe to any of their friends. I hear a lot of talk in the third wave about serving coffee but I hear almost none about serving customers. There is a lot of talk about doing right by the coffee but there is very little about doing right by your customers. If the fad changes and you don't have a strong culture of customer service in your cafe then you'll be dead in the water.

I'm not saying that is what is going to happen but it never hurts to look at your own actions from an outside perspective once in a while. We might be able to dismiss Mr. Carmichael's rantings and rancor without a second thought but I would suggest we would do so at our own peril.

Just food for thought.

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Permalink Reply by Brady on June 4, 2010 at 2:08pm

Mike Sabol said:

...What I think is really interesting is the fact that Esquire is running the pieces. We've all heard the critiques of the "Hipster Douchbags" a million times before and nothing much has come of it. But now a big national media outlet is targeting "Hipster Douchbags". I bet in six months Time magazine will run a story about how America is falling out of love with the "Third Wave".

Opinions of Mr. Carmichael's motivations not withstanding, I think there is a cautionary lesson to gather from the articles. For the sake of argument lets pretend that there is this "fad" that TC was poking at. Well, what if you own a coffee shop that is based on that fad? You are thinking that you're "all about the coffee" but in actuallity your success is based on riding the third wave. Talking the talk, walking the walk, with the beards, tats and everything. What are you going to do when you become the target of derision in an SNL sketch. A living cariacature. And you thought you were "all about the coffee". If there is a fad and the winds of fortune change then the rug will be pulled from your feet and you will be out of business...

Just food for thought.

Well said, Mike.

I had something similar (but not nearly as well written) going last night, but never got around to posting it.

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