Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer’s wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company’s liabilities.
This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn’t pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
(Hi, this is Tim Carmody filling in for Jason this week. Hope you all have had a lovely holiday and are ready for more bloggy goodness here at kottke dot org.)
For a variety of reasons, I recently found myself inside a legal marijuana dispensary for the first time. I wasn’t sure exactly what I expected the retail experience to be like — a liquor store? a coffee shop? a used car lot? the paraphrenelia shops I first checked out as a teenager? — but I was nevertheless surprised.
The closest analogy I can think of is a jewelry store. There was pretty decent security, including a whole separate room for customers to check in, and everything was presented in a secure display case. A salesperson walked you through the samples to answer questions, guide you in one direction or another, and take your order, while the order itself was filled in a secure area away from the showroom. The other shopping experience I’ve had that’s similar was buying medical equipment, which makes some sense given the origin of a lot of retail dispensaries in the medical marijuana era. You could also say it’s a little like a pharmacy (which again, is probably unsurprising).
Some of the setup of dispensaries is a function of legal regulations (do you need to check IDs and differentiate between medical and recreational customers?) and some of it solves some practical problems (weed is expensive and there’s still a viable aftermarket, so you are in principle a target for theft).
But it’s also a question of culture: who’s involved in the transaction as a seller and as a buyer, and what are their assumptions and competencies that they’re bringing to the party (so to speak)?
For instance, today Lifehacker (I know, right?) has a short interview with an entrepreneur who runs dispensaries in California, who comes out of the restaurant industry. (It’s titled “How to Break Into the Legal Weed Industry” which is, I think, a very rare kind of service journalism, or more likely, a simple explainer masquerading as service journalism.)
“My entrance into the cannabis industry was several years ago,” said Captor Capital’s Adam Wilks, who operates dispensaries in California, where he reported the business is “smooth sailing” for the most part. “I had worked in the restaurant industry for major brands, including Pinkberry. When I entered, we were just starting to see traction with federal legalization pushes like the SAFE Banking Act and statewide sweeps. I think I entered during the ‘sweet spot’ period where there was still a lot of excitement about an emerging industry and a lot of big money wasn’t quite ready to take risks. Now, everyone is funneling into cannabis.”
Now, a restaurant is a very different industry and has a very different culture than a pharmacy or jeweler or the marijuana sales industry as it’s existed pre-legalization. One might expect a very different retail experience by people with those competencies and expectations. As people from other industries enter the world of cannabis, an amalgamated lingua franca might start to emerge, or you might get very differentiated experiences in different markets.
There’s an Achewood comic titled “Marijuana is not coffee” that’s about five years old now that compares the emerging legal cannabis industry to coffee shops — not just ubiquitous but gentrified, made completely palatable by the American retail industry’s ability to turn anything into a consumer-friendly experience. The characters also imagine a whole cannabis-specific jargon, on the model of coffee talk. Here’s an excerpt:
I don’t know; someone with more than a passing acquaintance with these shops and their alternatives will have to do the full anthropology. But it does seem to me that with the legalization of marijuana, we are in the process of changing more than who is allowed to get high and who is allowed to get paid without being punished.
This drink from Chinese coffee chain Mellower Coffee is called Sweet Little Rain. A puff of cotton candy is suspended over a steaming cup of Americano. The heat from the coffee melts the cotton candy, which drips into the cup and sweetens the coffee. It is both a little bit of genius and unabashedly constructed for creating the perfect Instagram moment.
You’d think it’d be simple enough: make a disposable lid for a takeout coffee cup. You should be able to drink the coffee without removing the lid and the lid should stay on if the cup tips over (most of the time). But this simple design challenge has been solved in many different ways, as evidenced in Louise Harpman’s and Scott Specht’s forthcoming book, Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture.
The book is a partial catalogue of the authors’ extensive collection of coffee lids. Photos of the lids are organized into groups based on what you do with the lid to get at that sweet sweet beverage: peel, pinch, pucker, or puncture. They explained the four types of lid in an article for Cabinet magazine in 2005.
Certain lids, such as the Solo Traveler (1986) designed by Jack Clements, require the drinker only to place his or her mouth over the protruded polystyrene proboscis. The pucker-type lid requires its user to drink through the lid, not from the cup, as is the case in the peel-type lids. The Solo Traveler is the lid that Phil Patton championed in his 1996 article in I.D. magazine and also the lid that art and design curator Paola Antonelli selected for inclusion in last year’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Humble Masterpieces.” This type of lid offers a certain degree of “mouth comfort” and also has added “loft” space within the structure of the lid to accommodate beverages with frothy tops.
What a phrase: “protruded polystyrene proboscis”. Harpman also gives a short tour of the collection in this video:
Gear Patrol collected a number of coffee cups from coffee shops around NYC. Prices for a small cup ranged from $1 to $4.50. I’m guessing the latter was not 4.5 times tastier than the former. (via @mccanner)
Do you want to make a lot of espresso really fast? Enter the The Gatlino®, a machine gun that uses Nespresso capsules in place of bullets.
It was during one bleary break-of-dawn that I found myself slouched over the machine making coffee and drifting into visions of the Nespresso hooked up to a belt of ammunition, or a machine gun being fed by a chain of Nespresso capsules. I’m not sure which. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it led me to wonder how long it would take to fire all the Nespresso cartridges ever made. The environmentally-conscious will be appalled.
I don’t drink coffee — quelle horreur! quelle suprise! quelle whatevs! — but those around me seem excited by The Handpresso, a travel-sized espresso maker. The Wild Hybrid model even lets you use pods or your very own ground espresso (for less waste and better taste).
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.
Robinson Meyer drank a cup of coffee shipped hot overnight from a roaster in Minneapolis to The Atlantic’s office in DC as part of a Thermos promotion. He traces the beans, cultivated in Kenya and grown in El Salvador, all the way to his mug:
[T]here’s something that enables all of this, from my supping of the coffee to your reading this now: the global supply chain. The ability to fling ingredients and products from coast-to-coast and continent-to-continent makes not only Thermos’s contest but Spyhouse’s very business possible. It’s the supply chain that moves coffee beans from El Salvador to Minneapolis, where they can be roasted and sipped in days. It’s the supply chain—in the form of FedEx, which, remember, has the world’s fourth largest collection of aircraft—that performs the final stunt of getting coffee around the lower 48 in half a day.
Behind every ingredients list stand the movers and shippers of our world: each, like FedEx, possessing a private army of execution. I accepted Thermos’s coffee contest because it seemed a spectacle of logistics. But every single day of our lives is already that.
Meyer’s essay is part of what seems like a still-developing genre—Paul Ford’s essay on “the American room” is another example—of stories that excavate the hidden infrastructure that make everyday experiences possible. These systems are utterly prosaic exactly because they’re the product of huge amounts of manpower and material working according to painstakingly developed protocols. The author’s motivation for exposing them seems to be to both demystify and reenchant the world, and the attitude expressed is a mixture of admiration, awe, and dread.
Neal Stephenson’s classic Wired essay “Mother Earth, Mother Board” might be the model for the genre, like Tolkien is for epic fantasy. Let’s call it the “systemic sublime.”
In Japan, the ability to perfectly imitate-and even improve upon-the cocktails, cuisine and couture of foreign cultures isn’t limited to American products; there are spectacular French chefs and masterful Neapolitan pizzaioli who are actually Japanese. There’s something about the perspective of the Japanese that allows them to home in on the essential elements of foreign cultures and then perfectly recreate them at home. “What we see in Japan, in a wide range of pursuits, is a focus on mastery,” says Sarah Kovner, who teaches Japanese history at the University of Florida. “It’s true in traditional arts, it’s true of young people who dress up in Harajuku, it’s true of restaurateurs all over Japan.”
It’s easy to dismiss Japanese re-creations of foreign cultures as faddish and derivative-just other versions of the way that, for example, the new American hipster ideal of Brooklyn is clumsily copied everywhere from Paris to Bangkok. But the best examples of Japanese Americana don’t just replicate our culture. They strike out, on their own, into levels of appreciation and refinement rarely found in America. They give us an opportunity to consider our culture as refracted through a foreign and clarifying prism.
Another example, not mentioned in the piece, is coffee. From the WSJ a couple of years ago:
“My boss won’t let me make espressos,” says the barista. “I need a year more, maybe two, before he’s ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I’ll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos.”
Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe’s owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond’s main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.
In the West, and particularly in urban centers of the United States, we’ve turned coffee into not just a daily habit, but a totem of conspicuous consumption. They are “rituals of self-congratulation” (a choice phrase I believe I read from Sam Sifton, but which I can’t seem to source) wherein we continually obsess over certain coffee purveyors or certain methods of brewing coffee - each new one more complex, more Rube Goldbergian and more comically self-involved than the previous brewing fad.
I don’t drink coffee either (don’t even like the smell), but as someone who regularly indulges in other addictions and “rituals of self-congratulation”, I don’t take issue with other people’s enjoyment of coffee…as long as I’m out of earshot when the “perfect grinder for pulling a great shot” discussion starts.
Coffee, like almost everything else these days, is a sport. Everyone has a favorite team (or coffee making method or political affiliation or design style or TV drama or rapper or comic book), discusses techniques and relives great moments with other likeminded fans, and argues with fans of other teams. The proliferation and diversification of media over the past 35 years created thousands of new sports and billions of new teams. These people turned hard-to-find nail polish into a sport. Thesepeople support Apple in their battle against Microsoft and Samsung. This guy scouts fashion phenoms on city streets. Finding the best bowl of ramen in NYC is a sport. Design is a sport. Even hating sports is a sport; people compete for the funniest “what time is the sportsball match today? har har people who like sports are dumb jocks” joke on Twitter. Let people have their sports, I say. Liking coffee can’t be any worse than liking the Yankees, can it?
But in recent years, keeping the world’s coffee drinkers supplied has become increasingly difficult: The spread of a deadly fungus that has been linked to global warming and rising global temperatures in the tropical countries where coffee grows has researchers scrambling to create new varieties of coffee plants that can keep pace with these new threats without reducing quality.
While coffee researchers can do little to prevent climate change, they’re hard at work to keep up as Earth braces for temperature increases of several degrees over the next several decades.
“Coffee is the canary in the coal mine for climate change,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you can’t think about the long term risk for planetary impacts, think about the short term risk for your coffee. Know that a day without coffee is potentially around the corner.”
A short article about coffee and its relationship to The Enlightenment, and smart drugs and body enhancements that may lead to a second Enlightenment. Short on details, but long on implications.
Long, varied, and interesting recap from a participant at the 2006 United States Barista Championship. The drink he prepared for the competition (scroll to the bottom for the recipe) was called Coffee and a Cigar, a coffee drink with tobacco in it. “The tray never touches the table - ever. That’s just a faux pas that I think should result in immediate disqualification. What reason is there to place your dirty tray bottom on your clean table? None.”
Coffee in Paris sucks?. I don’t drink coffee myself (vile, vile stuff), but I’ve never heard anything bad about the coffee in Paris, aside from the complaint of some Americans that you can rarely get it to go.
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