Coffee FTW.
Today isn’t the first time Gaper’s Block’s Drive-Thru food blog has annoyed me, but it’s the first time their hipster-populist bent has led them to blow it on an article concerning my favorite beverage: coffee.
The post in question is about Intelligentsia’s recent moves to replace cheap drip coffee with brewed-to-order cups made in their Clover machines at all their stores. Contributor Mike Doyle writes:
…moneyed Lakeview is not downtown Chicago. It remains to be seen how well my home neighborhood’s diverse mix of fat-wallet yuppies, working-class office drones, and penny-pinching students will take to being charged $3.50 for a cup of reguar coffee.
If I were Intelligentsia, I’d worry about those latter two groups. Not for nothing, but they’re the majority down here, and I don’t see them doing anything other than walking right back out the door and over to SBUX or Caribou Coffee when the Clover-only menu makes its Randolph Street debut on Monday.
Having lived in the Loop on and off for four years as a poor SAIC student, I feel I’m in a good position to say that most of the college students Doyle’s talking about aren’t really going to be hurt by having one less coffee joint to go to, and Intelligentsia won’t really miss their business. My memory is that the vast majority of college kids who’d even go into a Starbucks have no problem whatsoever spending $3 or more on a latté. The ones who really are just scraping by would more likely go to Dunkin’ Donuts or just make their own brew.
Intelligentsia’s recent moves have been less about cutting cost, as Doyle suggests, than about (very, very tightly) focusing on their preferred market: coffee snobs. I don’t know that making mochas with ganache instead of cocoa is cheaper, but I know it makes a better drink, with a better flavor profile when mixed with Intelligentsia espresso.
The point of a drip coffee brewer is to make large quantities of “good enough” coffee, for when quantity is what’s needed. As they’ve said, Intelligentsia isn’t switching to the Clover because they expect to make more money. They expect that they’ll serve fewer customers and sell fewer cups of coffee by excluding the price-conscious drip coffee crowd. But the cups they do sell will be worthy of the Intelligentsia brand name, and overall the company will still make money.
To put it another way, they’re being very astute in realizing that competing with Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Caribou, McDonalds, 7-Eleven, et al., for the morning drip coffee trade is (no pun intended) a mug’s game. If you’ve ever worked in a coffee shop, or even hung around in one and paid attention, you know that most places throw out more coffee than they could ever sell, regardless of how frequently they brew new batches.
It’s wasteful, and it could be argued that the economies of scale needed to make drip coffee possible are a contributing factor to poverty and injustice in coffee-producing nations. Coffee being, of course, a commodity crop for which a massive quantity of beans, the result of an even more staggering amount of precision labor, yields only pennies. Intelligentsia wants to be seen as a high-end, gourmet brand, but they’ve generally been great about buying sustainably-produced, fairly-traded beans whenever possible. And one great thing about single-serving brewing processes like Clover is that each cup only consumes one cup’s worth of resources.
Of course, I’m a working stiff now, and I can (and often do) spend $3 and ten minutes getting a masterfully brewed cup of some of the world’s finest coffee. If I were a poor college student, I might feel like that was a luxury…which is why I’d probably just buy some beans and brew my own coffee at home.
Doyle’s post bugs me not because he’s less of an over-informed coffee nerd as I am, but because his arguments are so lazy. Ultimately, any concern that the drip-to-Clover transition will hurt Intelligentsia’s business is hypothetical. The angle of the piece is colored by the author’s obvious feeling that Intelligentsia’s move will be bad for him, and therefore it must be bad for everyone. If it can’t be FTW, it must be EPIC FAIL.
Me, I’m a little impressed by the company’s chutzpah. They’re tired of playing Starbucks’s game, and they’re smart enough to realize that to cater to everyone means their customers are only loyal so long as the price remains low. Good for them.
