Milwaukee Specialty Food and Coffee

Conviction and Transaction

The bar for two things seems to be set oddly low in Milwaukee: coffee and Chinese food. It's a slam dunk that with its large apartment-dwelling population, the Brew City's market for Chinese would be immense, with the bar to entry being correspondingly low. More mysterious, in my view, is why specialty coffee has become the service world's Suckistan--particularly in Milwaukee, but to a certain extent in other regions as well. Ninety miles to the south and west lie meccas for caffeinistes and caffeinistas. (I'll be going to one of them this weekend.) One might be forgiven for asking with all the other cool stuff to do in Chicago, why they need to do great coffee too. But so it is.

I'm guessing that the answer to Milwaukee's underachievement lies in some social and cultural dynamic in this town that I'm not keyed into.  From a business perspective, questions come to mind. Are the margins too low? One would think that could be made up for with volume, considering the coffee-inhaling German background so many of us share. Yet never, it seems, has a product been sold more lovelessly than coffee in the "German Athens."  On several occasions, I've heard coffee shop personnel say they don't drink coffee or even heard them ridicule the idea of paying market price for specialty coffee. Nowhere else is there such a gulf between conviction and transaction. No steakhouse would hire a militant vegan as a server, knowing that he or she would occasionally go off the reservation and state "meat is murder," would it?

I really love coffee. My Tassimo brewer and the exceptional new drip brewer I bought for the office are reminding me of that, and have made it fun for me again. I'll drink chalky lattes with a grimace and eat Chinese food even when it tastes of Pine-Sol--as it quite literally did on one occasion. While doing so, I'll dream of a time and place where coffee is given the care, attention and celebration it deserves.

Clear Windows

Increasingly, my views of religious bodies are dovetailing with my views of the US service industry. I don't need to huff and puff on this blog to advocate that both become more nimble and responsive, nor do I need to underscore the urgency of doing so. I believe the hard numbers are so dramatic that these organizations will either adapt or face extinction. Even if we postulate a 10-year delay in Baby Boomer retirement ("until they drop," as a recent AARP survey supposedly found out), the replacements for the relatively well-off Boomers simply aren't there. The conditions that pre-Boomers such as my parents enjoyed, so favorable to wealth-building--early marriage and homeownership, high interest rates on savings, and (at least usually) low gas prices--are vanishing or have already vanished. From early indicators, I must ruefully predict that neck braces will become a common sight among those in charge of religious bodies and those who sell consumer goods and services, resulting from the whiplash they experience from hitting a solid object after 20 to 30 years of boomy momentum.

The only way out, in my view, is a radical change in thinking. These institutions will need to take out the stained glass--the perceptual filters they employ--and gain a clear, sober view of the world. They will have to gain an honest appraisal of what they are doing for the world on a personal and societal level. The white suburban consumerist society will run out of means--if nothing else, human means, as our birth rate is well below replacement levels. What we install in its place is up to us.

Tassimo

Three or four months ago, I bought a Tassimo machine on eBay and liked it so much I bought a second machine for my apartment. The machine I have at home is one of the original models manufactured by Braun. Here it is in action:

The Braun machine makes an almost ideal cup of drip-quality mermaid-esque coffee using the Gevalia Dark House Blend pods. For whatever reason, the newer Bosch model seems to be the specialist at the milk drinks, doing less well with the drip brew. All in all, it's clear to me that the reason for the Tassimo's relative lack of market success is its failure to take into account its inevitable primary application, in this country at least: filling large travel mugs for Americans' marathon commutes. You can see that the unit in the video is filling the 10 oz. cup (which goes almost right up to the brew head; the round tray is removable to give you more room, but if you use the unit at all, the tray will usually be filled with liquid, obviating that feature) with a very Euro 7 or 8 ounces.

I Declare Fiddleheads a Princess-Free Zone

I note that some kind of (IMHO) ridiculous "Princess Tea Party" has been held in Cedarburg today. If I am blessed with children, I hope that my hopefully princess-free daughter(s) will learn that her desire to explore and experiment with various aspects of reality is a wonderful gift--and that I only ask and advocate that she use it wisely. "83% of CHS students choose NOT to use marijuana" reads a poster at Fiddleheads in Cedarburg. I'm going to play devil's advocate (and risk disinherit-age) by stating that I'm skeptical--both of the statistic and the principle behind it. Basically, I believe that life presents us with a wide variety of mind-altering substances and situations. Ultimately, we can only "choose" whether or not to be robust enough to withstand them.

If my daughter's appetite for the mind-altering ends up as a strong desire to go to the tea party--or, heck, to join the Tea Party--I hope that I'll suck it up and bite my tongue, or at most state my opinion in a matter-of-fact fashion while affirming that my love is unconditional. In that light, their inevitable acting out in an inappropriate way can be just a stepping stone towards a deeper relationship with my child. As an older Dad, I'll need plenty of reminders that some aspects of my view of the world may have passed their sell-by date. I'll have the ability to adapt and adjust, though at times with a grimace. That way, not only does my daughter not need to fit into some ridiculous pidgeonhole--neither do I.

Much more damaging, in my view, is the impulse to turn way-preteen girls into objects to be paraded around and segregated. (Mind you, I mean girls under 12 or 13--I was a precocious kid and know that the game can change quickly and drastically at around that age.)  With all of our tea parties, girls' nights out and girls' nights in--not to mention our man caves--we learn that to be truly unthreatened, we have to be in our treehouse, keeping the other sex out. Accordingly, it is only natural that divorce should be the peak experience in adult life in our society. Only by systematically declaring war on our spouse's flaws and annihilating our engagement with them can we truly develop ourselves as individuals, this philosophy holds.

I think that psychologically wholesome life comes only when we learn, pardon my French, that other people will do all kinds of crazy shit. And that we ourselves will do all kinds of crazy shit. Our choice is whether we can find opportunity for connection in the good and the bad--not in the kind of physical and psychological segregation that our boy-in-a-bubble society insists upon, but in the dirt and dust of interaction with others who are vigorously championing their own wants and needs.

Arizona: "That's, like, *Methodist* acting!"

Credit for this afternoon's blog title goes to the girl sitting behind me at the Starbucks on Hayden and Osborn, where I'm cooling off (!) with an iced Americano. Apparently she's an aspiring screenwriter. I was pleased with my response a few minutes ago to one of the top three anxiety-provoking scenarios in my life: a run-in with activity enthusiasts using another mode of transportation on the hiking trail. In this case, it was bikers. It wasn't really that close of a call.

What was remarkable was my emotional response: not a feeling of indifference, but the ability to feel neutral about it. After about a minute, I summarized the situation by concluding that other than bikes rode slowly with child carriers, bikes have always tended to annoy me--largely because I find them inordinately dangerous to the riders themselves. And then I was finished thinking about it, except for the purpose of recording it here.

To be fair, the bikers were much nicer about it than would likely have been the case in Milwaukee. This is a much more friendly and easygoing place, which I think is just a result of different evolution resulting from people from a wide variety of places being thrown together.

The Fragmentation Grenade Society

I just did a bit of shopping at Mayfair Mall and am reflecting on the mall's atmosphere. A midrange department store, Boston Store, is offering deep discounts at this seemingly well-positioned location also. Barnes & Noble seems to be hanging on at what was always its strongest area location, but I note (with a recommendation) that DVDs are now 3 for the price of 2. I blogged recently that one megatrend is human non-coexistence. Though it may sound like something static, I believe the situation is actually one of movement--indeed, explosive movement, much like that of a fragmentation grenade.

Seemingly, even the act of going to a retail store to select a few sweaters or video discs is more togetherness than we're interested in. A mile or two down Highway 100, a Starbucks location with late-night hours seems more like a Chuck E. Cheese with laptops than an adult coffeehouse. (And the perpetually overloaded Twitter servers, strained by the urge of untold millions like me to mutter to themselves in the company of the Internet, deny me the ability to tweet that zinger.)

In the first few decades of my life, Americans were slowly losing the ability to connect over food, drink, and sex; now, we're losing the ability to connect over consumption. And, as ever, I'm completely out of step with the zeitgeist. I'm grateful to be old enough to remember what it was like before we turned into Japan, with ubiquitous handheld gewgaws and giggling teenage girls. (Unfortunately, we wasted our time in paradise by having really bad hair.)  For a variety of reasons, I'm back there in spirit, and enjoying myself much more the second time around.

Perhaps ironically, certain food and drink items are providing some of the precious few opportunities for connection these days. People are still game to grab a cup of some nondescript hot beverage--almost always in a paper cup, so it doesn't feel too much like commitment--and maybe a bagel to enjoy among random strangers. But even that seems like asking a lot. What's problematic is that for our society to run at full throttle, people have to mix and mingle a little bit.

The public marketplace, entertainment, and even our places of worship have to be in a cahoots of sorts, providing a mutually reinforcing message. We may, for example, live in the exurbs and think of ourselves as always just barely outrunning the problems of Milwaukee County, which bark and bite at our asses as they sprint behind us. The marketplace has our back by not letting buses drop "those people" off at the doors of our malls, which are uncomfortably urban as it is. At church on Sunday, too often we search the sacred for a polished veneer to slap on to our bias against gays, lesbians, those insufferable NPR announcers and--let's face it--the people who sell us gas.

Anodyne

Breathing Bay View air is itself worth the drive. The moist air is cleaner due to the separation from downtown, and I detect (or imagine) a slight hint of the industry that once dominated the area. I may need to plant my stake in the ground here. I'm enjoying a wonderful cappuccino.

For Coffeehouses, There's No Business Like No Business

I believe some local coffeehouses, particularly those on E. Brady St., are better thought of as community centers than businesses. In that light, they seem quirky and endearing. To say that Rochambo is competing with Starbucks sounds as patently absurd as saying that I'm competing with Aaron Rodgers. There's just no intersection between those two worlds. They both exist on Planet Earth, but in entirely different realities. I've overheard Starbucks baristas consistently talking about how slow Starbucks' Brady location is. Basically, Starbucks can plop a store down there just for the hell of it. If the property assessments are as inflated as the rest of the neighborhood, I'd venture to guess that Rochambo and Brewed Cafe are scraping by and maybe a little more. (I have absolutely no information, and please do correct me if I'm wrong.)

Something that occurred to me more than once in last year's political turmoil is this: The standard of living, convenience and amount of leisure time we expect absolutely necessitate large, multinational and megapowerful corporations. The economies and efficiencies of scale and the systems and standardization driven by these corporations are the bedrock of today's American lifestyle. Unfortunately (or not), I don't think there's any way around downsizing our standard-of-living expectations if we want to decrease the wealth, power and influence of large corporations.

I think there should be different tracks of businesses, perhaps given different treatment by the IRS. I'd argue that Rochambo and Brewed Cafe function as community centers and should, if anything, be given block grants or something of that nature to improve their properties. As you can probably guess, I think Starbucks should pay through the wazoo. The ones somewhere in between, such as Stone Creek? Not quite sure.

We need people who can make a good cappuccino behind the espresso bar more than we need good businesspeople there. I can accept the erratic service if I stop thinking of it as a business. In many ways, I have as much in common with most local coffee shop baristas as I have with Aaron Rodgers. I think of myself as a pretty low-key guy, but I have to remember that I entered a serious business environment at a very early age for the tasks I was carrying out. I eat, drink and sleep business--well, not quite, but you catch my drift. It's been important for me to realize and accept that others are not going to be quite like that, and sometimes not at all like that. In the same way, I have to realize that when I walk into a coffeehouse, it is not a business as I understand the term.

Stone Creek Coffee News

I don't claim to have had any input on this, but I'm glad to see that Stone Creek Coffee will soon make much better use of their Downtown Milwaukee factory space by turning it into a retail store and other offerings open to the public. Oddly enough, I had a dream once about going there to pick up a pound or two of coffee and hanging out for a while after they had renovated it and opened it up to the public (yes, I'm geeky enough to dream about such things), so it will be fun to see this particular dream turn into reality.

The Saturday Afternoon Leading Economic Indicator

You know the world has gone crazy when banks and churches start serving good coffee! Running my Saturday noonday errands, I mused that money--like religion--has now also become a consumer product. At the medium-sized regional bank where I maintain a couple of accounts, Aaron Rodgers is the spokesperson. At the credit union where I maintain my other accounts, members of diversity categories are featured in the stock photography that accompanies any textual message, no matter how brief. (Thankfully, they don't put stock photos on account statements, as mine would no doubt show a Richard Lewis-like figure slapping his forehead.) 

It occurred to me that perhaps a truer indicator of my wealth is how I feel at about this time on a Saturday afternoon. Am I happy that the weekend has arrived? Do I feel like a day of rest is welcome, without feeling overly drained? Do I feel like I gave the work week everything I had? If the answer to these questions is "Yes," I can feel content and comfortable that my week was well lived. This makes my perception of my economic life measurable and internal.

Though it doesn't cause me to walk around with a black cloud over my head, I admit to becoming increasingly concerned about the ability of governments such as Iran's to coerce world events and affect people's lives, even on an individual level. It seems to me that the most effective way to defend ourselves is to tweak our lifestyle a little bit--not in the sense of letting the thugs win, but in the sense of taking away from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his like the disproportionate amount of power they wield over global events. It's disturbing to think of the possible repercussions if Iran's leader gets a bee in his bonnet, and perhaps equally disconcerting to think how we arrived at this scenario in the first place.