A key assumption in the establishment of A Climate For Coffee is that there is, potentially, and sometimes actually, a special bond between the coffee drinker and the place where they buy their cups of coffee.
Because of that relationship there also exists the opportunity to nurture an ongoing conversation between the café and the coffee drinker. Based upon that exchange, it is hoped that we, as an industry, might be able to convey, with a high degree of credibility, one particular message — that the Climate For Coffee is in a state of disruption and that the coffee tree, at its current level of world-wide propagation, may be imperiled.
If this idea has any hope of success, however, the overall quality of the conversation, if it exists at all, must also be nourished and encouraged — there needs to be a healthy Climate, not just for coffee, but for conversation — and a trust in the communication that occurs.
The relatively brief history of the coffee house indicates that these establishments can provide a platform for genuine communication within their communities. Real life conversations there are, by definition, more genuine and meaningful. Those on social media sites are algorithm moderated to benefit the platform, not the participants.
The first coffee shop owners realized that by establishing a place for community interaction that they could sell more coffee. The term, “Penny University*,” used to refer to coffeehouses in 17th Century England and, at the same time, laid out the bargain — that for a pittance, valuable information could be obtained, if not for an education, in toto. Today, that implied transaction, must be emphasized, those pennies (adjusted for inflation) must reasonably flow forth or the University in question cannot survive.
The difference on social media is that the algorithms are designed to provoke and spin our emotions up and out of control to keep us, each alone with our device, engaged, not with each other but with the platform, itself. The results can be toxic and deranged, we find ourselves feeling and thinking, and even typing, things that we would never have the discourtesy or the lack of self-awareness to say to each other in person. Social media encourages and captures the energy not of considerate neighbors but of isolated road rage; it does this not for our benefit, but for its own sustenance.
This is not to disparage social media overall, but to discuss the benefits, to the coffeehouse, to the coffee drinker and to the community, of having folks physically show up in a place where they can sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee as opposed to grabbing a cup via drive-thru while responding to a text & trying not to crash into the driver in front of them. Maybe this is all naive and fantastical but this recent article, Viva la coffee shop: Why we need to meet up in them, now!, on CNN’s website, (“dumb & outdated” I thought, at first) might presage something — our possible re-matriculation at our local Penny University.
* Ironic in a time when we, in the U.S., may be just about to lose our pennies, and when other nations have already discontinued theirs.
I could not resist the image used here, as it doesn’t exactly depict the cordial discourse to which I aspire in my post. It appears on this web page: “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse By Matthew Green“ of the site, The Public Domain Review, with this caption, “A disagreement about the Cartesian Dream Argument (or similar) turns sour, note the man throwing coffee in his opponent’s face. Detail from the frontispiece of Ned Ward’s satirical poem Vulgus Brittanicus (1710) and probably more of a flight of fancy than a faithful depiction of coffeehouse practices.“
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