I, like most of us, am a creature of habit and when those habits are disturbed I find myself unsettled. The latest example of this is an unprecedented interruption in that most holy of personal activities – securing my morning cup of coffee.
I get my morning coffee at three locations depending upon the day of the week. On Saturdays and Sundays, coffee is taken at our home in Humptulips County, the product of a ritual usually performed by me alone in our kitchen during the early morning hours while Helen is still sleeping and I am working in our library. I go downstairs at the appointed hour (5:30 AM) and fire up our Nespresso machine, taking each step in a fixed sequence which leads to a morning mocha (raspberry, without excessive foam or whipped cream). With the resulting mocha in hand, I reascend to the library and continue my morning’s work or my reading until such time as my wife gets up and has breakfast ready.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, coffee is courtesy of an independently owned coffee-house next door to the club where I play racquetball. Following completion of our racquetball games, my friend Dick and I go next door and alternate buying the morning’s coffee. We enjoy arguing with one another about whose turn it is to buy, more for the fun of trying out some new form of inverted logic in support of a wholly unsustainable position about whose turn it is to buy rather than actually avoiding having to pay when it is one’s turn. Dick and I have gone to the same location for several years and we never seem to tire of our ancient argument, even if those around us may well be tired of hearing it.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get my morning cup of coffee by myself (Dick and I don’t play racquetball on those days) at a nearby Starbucks (in Seattle, the term “nearby Starbucks” is probably an oxymoron since they exist on every significant street corner). On these mornings, I religiously leave my office at about 5:28 AM so that I can arrive at the Starbucks in the next block at 5:30 AM when they open. Or, at least I did until this morning.
Last week, the morning barista at Starbucks told me that my usual location had new hours and they wouldn’t be opening until 6:00 AM due to a lack of an earlier morning customer base. Since I see the same folks in line every morning and often have to wait my turn to be served, I found this announcement a bit surprising. What was even more surprising was my reaction this morning when 5:28 rolled around. I found myself determined to get my coffee “on time” despite the delayed opening of my usual haunt, and reviewing the Starbucks’ website to see when other nearby Starbucks locations were open. When I found that two of them, both within a block, were already open, I quite happily forswore my usual location because the timing of my morning coffee fix was more important to me than the where of it.
And so it was that this morning I test drove another Starbucks location in the June rain which is a fixture of Seattle’s weather. The coffee was the same, as was my usual snack, although I missed my usual chatter with my favorite barista, a young woman who is a near neighbor in my part of Humptulips County and who drives even farther than I do to work each day by a distance of about 5 miles. She is pleasant in the low-key manner that is common to most Starbucks baristas, but I rather think that time and habit will prevail over our usual morning comparison of traffic eccentricities, since the mere thought of delaying my morning fix by an entire half hour is not welcoming.
Yesterday was a Monday and Dick and I went, as usual, to the independent coffee-house next to the club. For a long time, this coffee-house was run by a crusty older fellow with whom we traded daily barbs. Not everyone liked him, but we always did. We enjoyed his directness and his ready willingness to boot out a customer whom he felt didn’t belong. He recently sold out to a young couple who are “foodies” to such an extent that they are almost arrogant in their seeming worship of food as a cultural icon. I haven’t really been comfortable with them since they are lazy about the most important element of my morning coffee ritual – service and conversation.
The truth is I don’t like the young woman who runs the place. She simply isn’t my cup of tea, if such a cliché can be used about a coffee-house proprietress. She is sassy without a sense of caring, and overbearing in her constant demand that she be admired, if not adored, for her foody creations. I miss the crusty old gent that used to own the place, who could make a cup of coffee faster than anyone else I have ever seen. For he made a cup of coffee at full quip, his unending commentary coming as hard and as fast as his hands moved in their performance of the coffee-making ritual. And while his food wasn’t nearly as good as that now served by the young couple, its plainness was more appealing given the brusque, friendly, personal jibes with which it was served than that of delightful, foody creations delivered with an in-your-face sass about the essential excellence of the food and its creators.
In short, I am going to change my Monday, Wednesday, Friday coffee-house because I don’t like the people or their attitude. Their conversation is wrong for me even though their times of operations remain unchanged and their food is good. For they aren’t really serving coffee; they are, instead, serving a “Breakfast Experience”, and such an experience I would rather forego.
So here I am in a coffee dilemma, changing both of my normal locations for what seem at first glance to be different reasons: one because the old location no longer opens at the time it used to and because it isn’t within me to wait for another 30 minutes for my morning fix; one because the quality of the experience has changed for the worse, even though the food served is much better than it used to be.
So what’s all this about? A barista at a prior coffee haunt of mine next door to a former office location used to opine that people really didn’t come for coffee, they came for the conversation. I think he was right about that. Given the time for reflection about this issue (now that I have been primed for thought through consumption of my morning’s cup), what seems true is this: Starbucks, being a chain, offers similar experiences store-by-store, such that any one location isn’t all that different from another even if the baristas vary a bit in personality (but not in age). However, an independent coffee-house is dependent upon its personality to draw in its particular portion of the crowd of coffee drinkers that populate this city, and an unpleasing personality is a turn off.
I suppose I should be enchanted by all the foody creations produced by the young couple in which they take such evident pride, but the truth is that they and their creations turn me off. I don’t need to be lectured about what I ought to like and why I ought to like it. So, I leave the youngsters to those members of the coffee drinking society who wish for the experience to be a wholly upscale activity. What I need from my morning cup of coffee is either (a) the same product served reliably, if blandly, from location to location, or (b) a great cup of unique coffee served by an idiosyncratic personality with whom I have a history of rough and tumble give and take. Foodies just don’t fit the bill, for my morning coffee is an addiction best taken with a chaser of friendly guff or taken blandly without any chaser whatsoever.
As to my weekend ritual, I intend to not vary one iota from that which is working so well. After all, on those days of the week I am in the company of one of the most idiosyncratic personalities I know from whom I have taken plenty of guff over the years.
