Flyover Country

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I just read a tweet from Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) about a foodservice issue.

jeffjarvis Fucking Starbucks. What’s so hard about keeping a pot of coffee full in a COFFEE STORE? I had 2 min. to get a cup. They wasted my time. Grr

What’s hard about keeping the supply of ready-to-serve product full is the actions of the customers. Lots of things come into play here. First, Starbucks has developed the expectation that when you order coffee, you’ll get it right away. Not a bad expectation to build, but it does set you up for problems when you don’t meet that expectation. And you will fail to meet that expectation at some point.

In this case, all it would take is for one or more customers to buy more than what the system (designed to build those high expectations) could accommodate. One customer ordering ten coffees for the office when there is only enough for ten coffees brewed means the next customer or next few customers is going to have to wait. There isn’t much that can be done to avoid that. There is, however, much that can be done to address it when it does happen.

The situation should have been explained to Jeff. “I’m really sorry, but we just had someone come in and order a dozen coffees to go, and it ran us out. We’re brewing more right now, and it’ll be a few minutes before its ready.” That would probably have blunted Jeff’s initial frustration at Starbuck’s not meeting his expectations. Any questions Jeff may have asked at that point would have been an opportunity to tell the Starbucks story of fresh vs. stale coffee and maybe the suggestion of an alternative that could have been made ready quickly – at the same price. In any case, Jeff should have been given a card for a free coffee at a later date, as a gesture of contrition for not meeting the expectations that they’d created.

Whether Starbucks has a policy where any employee can do that kind of damage control, I don’t know. If they don’t, they should. They had no idea that Jeff would tweet about it to his 2665 twitter followers, but his greater reach into the public shouldn’t matter. No customer should walk out of any store or shop angry that the expectations the store or shop has built for themselves weren’t met. Meet the expectations and make sure you can cover those rare times when you don’t meet them or work to build new, lower expectations that you can meet.

I subscribe to a dozen or so food blog RSS feeds. (I should probably add links to them here somewhere…) These aren’t blogs that just discuss the relative merits of particular foods or how best to make a meal into a dining experience. Nope. All the ones I follow have recipes to go along with their commentary. And some of the most amazing pictures to go along with the recipes.  Most are copyrighted, which makes it a bit difficult to show just how amazing they are, but I’ll provide this link to a picture that went with a dessert recipe that got made the day after I read the blog post about it. It’s from the Bake or Break blog, and it’s for something called Chocolate Cobbler. I know cobblers are usually a fruit dessert, and I have nothing against the fruit variety of cobbler. But sometimes, you just want something chocolate and a little out of the ordinary. Let me tell you, Chocolate Cobbler nails it. Gooey, cocoa-y sauce covers to the bottom of the pan, with a rather fluffy yet crunchy cake on top. Scoop what you want out of the pan, spoon the still-warm sauce over the top and drift away into dessert bliss. Some will want to dip out some ice cream or whipped cream over it all, but I think that just detracts from the richness of the cobbler itself.

If you like chocolate, go! Visit the Bake or Break blog, get the Chocolate Cobbler recipe, and make it tonight. Save room for it, because you will want a second helping. Or two.