Project Cluck / Part II: Chicken School

The Hamburg: a fine looking bird

A few weeks ago we headed to the city of Seatac to go to chicken school. Seatac is the “city” that is home to our major airport. I say “city” not to be snide – it’s just that Seatac has only been a city for a dozen or so years and it just seems kind of funny to me. The class was held at City Hall. In the city council chamber. Which is funny in itself, because it’s not like Seatac is a rural community – it’s mostly runways, hotels, parking lots and fast food places. To end all the Seatac talk in this opening paragraph, here’s all you need to know: We spent a night in one of the motels near the airport a couple years ago when we had an early flight the next morning – parking and airport transfers included. In the elevator is a sign. It says “No refunds 10 minutes after check-in.” Peculiar wording aside, two things immediately became clear: 1) the room’s not gonna be very nice and 2) best not to think about this too much.

The class was offered by King County Extension, essentially an outreach by our state’s land grant school, Washington State University. Here is some information about what land grant schools are – it’s pretty cool – basically a law signed by President Lincoln made it possible for the Federal government to grant land to the states; said land was to be used by the states to teach people how to do really useful things, like growing crops and making stuff. Not a bad idea.

I knew I was going to have a good evening after I texted our 14-year old daughter to let her know where would be, when we’d be home (like she cares!) and all that. I told her we were headed to a chicken seminar near the airport. Her response:

You guys are so awesome. CHICKEN SEMINAR.

How could I not be enthused after a response like that?

The Leghorn: a classic chicken

About sixty other people showed up, and it was pretty informative. We’d learned quite a bit on our chicken coop tour and not to boast, but we have become pretty poultry-savvy in a relatively short period of time. One thing about chickens though: there’s nothing really very intrinsically attractive or interesting about them. If you’re not into them, this whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. So I’ll dispense with lots of chicken facts and just throw out a few highlights from the class, all of which stuck with me because of their strangely euphemistic quality:

• There are lots of resources out there, my favorite one being Backyard Chickens.com. (Before you look, guess how they represent the “o” in “com” on their home page!!) From the website comes a chart with over 40 varieties of chickens. Information is provided about their size (two only, standard and bantam); egg size, type and color; comb type (mostly pea or V-shaped, but also single, walnut and buttercup – you’re on your own here); climate hardiness (hot, cold, all); broodiness (frequent, average, seldom –this has to do with the breed’s tendency to sit on the egg and hope it hatches vs. its desire to give it up so you can go inside and make an omelet); and temperament (one to avoid may be the Buckeye – her temperament is described like this: aggressive, friendly, wild, restless. noisy.) Please email me if you’d like to make a smart remark about that descriptor. Anonymity is guaranteed.

The euphemistic high point of the chart, however, comes under the heading labeled “Purpose.” There are three possibilities: egg layer, ornamental and dual purpose. It turns out that “dual purpose” doesn’t mean ornamental / egg layer; it actually means egg layer / meat.

• The program included a lot of good information, much of it focused on getting us to really think about the nature of the commitment involved in owning backyard chickens. One slide dealt with the issue of “The geriatric chicken.” As hens age, they lay fewer eggs – though one woman in the crowd who, based on her experience must have thought this was an upper division class, proudly shared that she has a 12-year old hen that laid 80 eggs last year -- still over one per week but nowhere near the 4-5 eggs younger hens produce each week. The bullet point that dealt with this issue, in its entirety:

o Keep for life-span or ?

Here’s a slightly creepy bit of wisdom someone shared: Craig’s List is a good way to find someone willing to pick up your no longer productive hen. I would suggest having them drop by the house while the kids are at school, however.

• Finally, this little item on another page of the presentation dealing with day-to-day care and chores, tucked neatly between “Food and water” and “Play time”:

o Cleaning the Vent

Perhaps the capitalized V should have been a tipoff…but this has nothing to do with airflow in and around your coop. It involves a Q-Tip, warm water, and one end of the chicken: the end opposite the one the food goes in. Kids thus far have shown heavy interest in certain aspects of this project, but the Cleaning of the Vent, not so much .

Following the class, we did make on significant decision: where to put the coop. Due to a strange building that was on our patio when we moved in, and I suspect something unpleasant having to do with drainage, there is a nice sized patch of dirt (where we’ve grown some great tomatoes this summer) surrounded by concrete on the patio, in view of the living room. We’re going to put the coop on the concrete, with the dirt area making up the “run” where the hens can spend some outside time. (They’ll also get time in the yard when they can be supervised.) Added bonus: the coop will be just a few feet from the Weber – not that we’re planning to eat the hens, but its ominous black lid and occasional smoke emanating from it may help the training process move along a bit faster.

The Plymouth: A classic dual purpose bird

People You Should Know About: Piet Hein

Volume II: Piet Hein / Danish / 1905-1996

Discerning the difference between a simple but valuable nugget of wisdom and a horribly tired cliché can be tricky. The context and the medium can sometimes be good clues. Business meetings are of course an opportunity to practice wariness – you never know when you might be handed a “Reach for the Stars Positive Pal Starfish,” offered by the good people at Successories.com, with this explanation:

Let these Positive Pals plush toys work for you - no training necessary! Gifts, incentives, giveaways…these are just a few ideas for using our affordable Positive Pals stuffed animals. Use Positive Pals plush toys wherever a smile is needed!

And affordable they are – just $4.99 in quantities of 250 and up. It’s pretty tempting, really: I believe the “no training necessary” promise, and it’d be nice to forego smiles for a while and just chuck plush at all the overachievers I meet.

I’m happy to report that Piet Hein has nothing to do with Positive Pals. But I did become aware of him in a context that had potential to devolve into cheesy motivational tools. Several years ago, I did some coffee presentations and participated in workshops in Palm Springs as part of Starbucks’s launch of new training programs. The meetings were held at a very cool and authentic mid-century resort; its best days were long in the past, but it was nearly empty and I’m sure the price was right.

At the opening of one of the workshops each participant was given a small, rectangular card, perforated so it could be opened like a greeting card. Breaking the seal revealed a pithy saying; once we read them we were directed to discuss them with our tablemates. Here’s what I saw when I opened mine:

Problems worthy of attack

prove their worth

by hitting back

--Piet Hein

Now this wasn’t life-changing, but in a world where “There’s no ‘I’ in team” passes for wisdom, my little card struck me as pretty meaningful. This was probably in the mid- to late-nineties, which was, as was pretty much always the case, a period of rapid growth and change at Starbucks. I suppose what I like about this little verse (I would soon learn that they were called “Grooks” and that there are hundreds of them.) was that it brought another dimension to the old idea that “if was easy anyone could do it.” For me, it helped crystallize the notion that change, newness, risk – all the things we say are necessary for success – are hard in part because there is always something – a person, an idea, a structure –that would rather see things stay the same. And they hit back. If the problem isn’t big or serious enough to do so, it may not be a problem worthy of our efforts.

So it stayed with me. I kept that little card on my desk for years. And when I got back to the office, I did a little research on Piet Hein – the name seemed a little unusual, so I was pretty sure he wasn’t a motivational speaker from Newport Beach. Turns out he was Danish, and he invented a shape, was a designer, writer, philosopher and more. And internationally, he is considered the third best known Dane of the 20^th century. Can you name either of the other two? (Answers are at the end of this post.)

He invented a shape. That alone seems pretty cool to me. Here’s the story, straight from www.piethein.com :

Harmonic forming in mathematics: The superellipse
Parallel to his poetic work, Piet Hein decided to find an absolutely harmonic physical design. With mathematical intuition he first found the form and then explained it afterwards. His superellipse was to solve the double contrast between the circle and the square and that of the ellipse and the rectangle. By means of mathematics he found a harmonic geometrical figure which was first used on a large scale in connection with the solution to a town planning problem in Stockholm. In a rectangular square, 200 metres long, in Stockholm's centre two motorways were to meet in a gigantic roundabout. The solution was the application of the superellipse to both square and roundabout at the new Sergels Torg. Later on the superellipse has been used in Canada, France, Japan, the US and Mexico in connection with the solution of as different constructions as residential areas and sports centres for example the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City:

Within furniture design the superellipse also became the solution to various problems -especially in relation to Piet Hein's design of tabletops the superellipse became popular. In a three-dimensional version the superellipse became the superegg which has been used for metal versions of various board games, superegg drink coolers and the anti-stress ball. Especially the latter reached an enormous distribution in the 1970s. In addition to his work with the development of the superellipse Piet Hein has executed a great many other design commissions, from board games in wood to the elegant Sinus lamp

If you spend just a few minutes on the website, you’ll likely find something familiar – a design sensibility you may have taken for granted, or even a toy from childhood. Give it a look.

Because I am much more verbal than spatial, it’s the little bits of verse that I find most intriguing about Hein. In 1940, the Danish newspaper Polotiken began publishing Hein’s little poems, which were known as “Gruks” – “Grooks” in English. It’s not clear where the name came from – apparently Hein said it “just came to him.” Others believe it is combination of the Danish words “grin” and “suk” (laugh and sigh). I’d like to think that this is the origin, because so many of them prompt in me those two reactions. So I’m just going to end this with a few of my favorites.

Here’s one about patience:

T. T. T.

Put up in a place

where it's easy to see

the cryptic admonishment

T. T. T.

When you feel how depressingly

slowly you climb,

it's well to remember that

Things Take Time

This one’s just fun:

SOCIAL MECHANISM

When people always

try to take

the very smallest

piece of cake

how can it also

always be

that that's the one

that's left for me?

On being one’s own worst enemy:

ON PROBLEMS

Our choicest plans

have fallen through,

our airiest castles

tumbled over,

because of lines

we neatly drew

and later neatly

stumbled over

And finally, something familiar:

A MAXIM FOR VIKINGS 

Here is a fact

   that should help you fight

      a bit longer:

Things that don't actually 

      kill you outright

      make you stronger.

To read a whole lot more of these, visit http://tiny.cc/ULoGp

Oh yes: the two 20^th century Danes with more international fame than Piet Hein: physicist Neils Bohr and author Karen Blixen

Miracle Whip Is the New Black!

“We are Miracle Whip. And we will not tone it down” is the defiant tagline for a new ad campaign for Miracle Whip, which was once known as simply “the Kraft bread spread.” The new Gen-Y focused TV ad first caught my eye a couple weeks ago. While I haven’t rushed out and bought a jar (or a one-gallon vat, which is apparently one of the options), if my Gen-Y daughters request it, we may give it a try.

I found the really cool ad, which you can see here (http://tiny.cc/sAC1w) quite remarkable. For one, it took me back to childhood: ours was a mayonnaise family, and one of my best friends lived in a Miracle Whip household. I should mention that I was somewhat more aware of this kind of stuff than most kids, because my dad worked for General Mills. Though “Big G,” as we called it, was not in the sandwich spread business, (Kraft makes Miracle Whip and appears to be the leader in mayo) I was probably more aware of food and foodlike substances than most kids my age, because where there were choices, we were pretty much limited to General Mills products. Because breakfast cereals were hugely important to Big G and a significant part of my diet, I was keenly aware of foods I ate at friends’ houses that were unavailable at home. So for some reason, the allure of Miracle Whip, which I only experienced elsewhere, was conflated with the frankly superior hedonics of cereals like Cap’n Crunch and Super Sugar Crisp. So all of that is to say that I’ve always been aware that Miracle Whip and mayonnaise are two different things.

The other reason I found the ad remarkable can be summed up with the word “Huh?” I suppose it’s possible that the flavor of Miracle Whip – with is “zing” (more on that word later) and sort of assertive, weird sweet-but-tangy quality – could appeal to the Gen-Y taste buds, which are known to favor extreme (XTreme) flavors. I’ve long suspected that Miracle Whip was invented when someone at Kraft was testing the shelf life of mayonnaise and discovered that just before it’s foul enough to actually sicken someone, mayo takes on a pleasing-to-some tanginess. The food scientist involved no doubt reported this to the product management and marketing people, who rather than thinking of the words “food safety” thought of the words “line extension” or “new product opportunity.”

“It’s a Miracle,” said the product manager.

“I’ll Whip up a deck,” responded the marketer, “and start socializing it with leadership.” And a product was born.

Given the resources that Kraft has, why wouldn’t they just develop a new condiment? In a world where “Baconnaise” becomes news, wouldn’t it make more sense to get something new out there, to try to really create some buzz? I’m sure Kraft looked into this, and perhaps concluded that they were better off spending their money on marketing. And really, given all that’s going on “in the social networking space,” why not skip the headache of product development and just change the way they talk about the product? So in addition to the hip TV ads, they’ve also developed “Zingr.” (Apparently Gen-Y consumers don’t like spelling the whole word if they can avoid it. LOL.) Zingr is “the newest way to add your own flavor to the web. Zing anything you deem worthy of your wit.” You can download Zingr and use it on Facebook to “zing” your friends by adding your own witty remarks, validated by Miracle Whip’s ever-so-right now graphic motif. So we must conclude that Kraft’s research showed that Gen-Y consumers are most interested in products that somehow create synergy between social networking and sandwiches. I can only imagine the marketers at Heinz and French’s scrambling to counteract Zingr: “I know, how about ‘Splat?’” It’d be awesome to splat someone when they write on your wall…we could totally make it look like yellow graffiti…”

In an interview with Media Post, a Kraft spokesperson said, “Many people enjoyed Miracle Whip in the past, but with so many flavor options today, many of them -- especially younger consumers -- have lost sight of this tangy original dressing.” So they’ve ended up in Shredded Wheat territory, which has a campaign going now that boldly states “Progress is overrated” and “We put the no in innovation.” (The Shredded Wheat campaign has a fun series of episodic ads available for viewing at http://thepalaceoflight.com/.) Fair enough – a TV ad that looks like MTV combined with a social networking add-on might do the trick.

But the Kraft spokesperson goes on to say, “We have reinvented Miracle Whip, and we want to bring its one-of-a-kind flavor back in front of younger consumers who might not be thinking about it." Hmmm. Two things:

• You are wrong on the first point. You have not reinvented it. The whole point is that you haven’t changed it. (“And we will not tone it down.”)
• You are correct on the second point. Younger consumers are not thinking about Miracle Whip

Zing!

Disclaimers and clarifications:

• Some of you have noticed that I recently became a fan of Miracle Whip. This is Facebook fandom ONLY, and is for research purposes only. I am a mayo man, though for sandwich-based applications, especially if roast beef is involved, I’ll go with mayo on one slice and horseradish on the other. That’s some real zing.
• For the record, mayonnaise predates Miracle Whip by about 180 years. Mayo was invented in France in 1756, but didn’t debut in the US till 1905. Miracle Whip came along in 1933.
• Miracle Whip tastes the way it does because it has a whole lot of sugars in it as well as what I’m sure is a secret blend of spices.

People You Should Know About: An Occasional Series

Volume I: Introductory Remarks

When I was in about third grade my parents gave me a book called “The Golden Book of Quotations.” I still have that book, and still remember a lot of the quotations in it. One of them, attributed to Alexander Dumas, I have found both funny and true since the first time I read it. (“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”) I have always enjoyed having little aphorisms like this at my disposal, so I look for them, and I usually remember who said it and where I read it. So I guess I’ve always been curious not just about information, but its source as well. I cannot imagine, for example, loving a book, telling someone about it, and then not knowing the author’s name. In fact, I’m more likely to correctly remember an author’s name than a book’s title.

Now, as a curious adult who has both the time to be curious and easy internet access, I am able to dig a bit deeper when I read a pithy statement or hear an interesting idea, and often I’ll try to learn something about the sources of things I find intriguing. I don’t dig as often as I should, arrogantly assuming that my not having heard of someone is a reflection of their lack of fame or their unwillingness to retain a proper PR firm. Other times, my curiosity gets the best of me and I dig; what I find out is always rewarding.

So that brings me to People You Should Know About (PYSKA). In the coming weeks, prepare to meet some interesting people here at Sodcutter. The folks I plan to write about came to my attention in a variety of ways – including what appeared to be junk mail in one case. I make no claim to have discovered these people, and they have no need of the meager “publicity” an appearance in this blog will provide. So this is really about appreciating the special, unique intelligence that is all around us. I learned about these folks only because I took the time to respond to one tiny jolt of curiosity, and then found that my appreciation of their work grew as a result of knowing a bit more about them. I think the same will be true for you, and I hope over time you’ll share some of you discoveries with me.

Project Cluck / Part One: Commitment

“I’ve already decided, but it takes Tim a little longer to get committed,” I heard my wife say on the phone to a friend this morning. Whether the central assertion of her statement is true or not is a question for the ages; my immediate need was to figure out exactly what I would eventually be committing to. “The coop tour was great,” she said next, “it was so fun seeing all the different kinds of chickens. It’s going to be really hard to decide which kind to get.” So I guess we’re getting some chickens.

A couple of Saturdays ago we spent about half a day visiting chicken coops, as part of a tour sponsored by Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org). It actually was terrific fun, meeting proud chicken owners and seeing their gardens, coops and chickens…and dogs, cats, goats, etc. The appeal of the whole thing is undeniable. There’s something transfixing about watching hens scuttle about the yard, making funny little sounds; they appear quite self-actualized, especially when, based on how tiny their heads are, it’s not likely there’s a lot going on inside them.

In Seattle, you can have up to three hens (no roosters), plus one additional hen per thousand square feet of land. Because lots of people ask, yes, hens will lay eggs even if there is no rooster about, but said eggs contain no chicks. And –OK, this is odd – you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay based on the color of the feathers on their earlobes. There are a lot of things about the anatomy of the hen I’d rather not know, but it honestly never occurred to me that they have earlobes, let alone that the feathers on them mean anything. Also, other than color, there is no difference between eggs of different shades.

Chickens in America lay about 75 billion eggs a year, about ten per cent of the global total, and we consume over 99% of them here in the US. So each year, American hens (that is, hens living in America) produce roughly 250 eggs per person. Yikes. About sixty per cent of these eggs are used by consumers; the rest are used in processed foods (~30%) and the foodservice industry (~10%). Chinese chickens lay 390 billion eggs a year – about 293 per person. (I’ve heard but have not verified that General Tso’s chicken in particular lays very tasty eggs.) China’s chickens lead the world; I’m not sure if that’s on a per-hen basis or if they just have more chickens. My guess: American hens are the best educated, most productive ones on the planet.

(Click on this link to learn more about chickens and eggs: http://tiny.cc/iShDA. Two caveats: First, the videos are a bit disturbing – not in a PETA sort of way, so no worries there. There’s just something alarmingly earnest (Midwestern?) about the two laptop-toting “students” who guide us through Egg Facts 101, but the Introduction is a “must see.” Second, the American Egg Board, to whose site this link takes you, is not so concerned with the whole “which came first?” part of the conversation, so don’t go looking for that level of discourse on their site. The AEB are the people who bring you the “incredible edible egg” campaign. And we won’t be joining, unless we start buying up the whole neighborhood and tearing down houses – you need 75,000 layers to join. (Our little rambler sits on a 5,980 square foot lot; if we can only have one extra hen per 1,000 feet, we’d need another 15,000 lots at 5,000 square feet each – about 1,722 acres.)

But here’s the thing: based on what I’ve learned thus far about how many eggs a hen can lay in a year, there’s pretty much one hen out there for each of us. And so if there’s a chicken out there laying eggs for me, why shouldn’t it live in my backyard? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the whole thing – talking to chicken owners; you get an overwhelming sense that having hens is just really satisfying. I wonder if it’s not partly because there’s this happy symbiosis between households and hens? It’s pretty cool, really. And that’s before you start thinking about the living conditions many hens endure, carbon footprint, and all the other stuff we’ve become conditioned to consider as consumers.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

The Espresso Dilemma (Solved!!)

It’s now been five months since my unplanned departure from Starbucks. Of the many adjustments I’ve had to make, several concern coffee acquisition and consumption. Specifically, what products are out there that I’ll like, and how much should I expect to pay for them?

I really like coffee, and I have a bit of a caffeine dependency. I’m not one of those people who drink coffee all day long. I drink more coffee than the average person, but no more than the average coffee drinker. Chances are, if you drink coffee, you drink about 3 cups a day. There is obviously a sense in which caffeine is addictive, but unless you consider crankiness antisocial behavior or believe people resort to crime to feed their habit, it’s hard to make the case that caffeine is addictive in the same way other drugs are. Of course people in the coffee business discuss this whole topic only reluctantly and always euphemistically. “Habituating mood-enhancer,” a phrase I heard from someone at one of Starbucks’s many ad agencies over the years, is perhaps my favorite way to express our reliance on coffee. (Rule of thumb: if you work for Starbucks, you never use an apostrophe with Starbucks, in any situation, for any reason; once you’ve left, you’re on your own to run with this as far as your apostrophal comfort will take you.)

But aside from dependency, for which a wicked, debilitating headache is pretty much the worst-case outcome, the whole matter of paying for coffee is something I’ve had to confront. As a Starbucks employee, one of my benefits was a free pound of coffee every week. In addition to that, I was entitled to a 30% discount in Starbucks stores and could drink all the coffee I wanted at the office, including espresso beverages.

This brings up the whole question of value, which is one of the big business challenges facing Starbucks right now. When coffee is free or deeply discounted, it’s easy to forget what customers pay for it. Over the years, as Starbucks added dozens and dozens of flavors, new drink “platforms” and expanded nationally, it was really easy to have essentially no idea what customers were paying. Prices differed from market to market, but not always in ways you might assume – an area where costs might be higher may also have more competition, which would put downward pressure on prices. Areas with little competition created different issues: in some respects, Starbucks was basically able to establish the value of specialty coffee products in such markets. This opened the door to less sophisticated startups, who could simply match Starbucks pricing, getting premiums they had not earned, and to others who saw the opportunity to undercut the out-of-towners.

One of the first times I really had to think about this question of value was in my early years at Starbucks, when Howard Behar, one of the legendary leaders of the company, wanted to change one feature of the discount policy. In those days, employees were entitled to free beverages, anytime, in any store, whether you were working or not. Howard felt it was important, for a variety of reasons, that we pay at least a discounted price for drinks when we weren’t working. It was pretty controversial – by definition, it seemed to be a “takeaway” – always unpopular. I recall debating this with a colleague who worked in restaurant sales, which meant he spent a lot of time on the road and that he would potentially be affected more than most people. In the end, his admission that it would no longer be worthwhile for him to pull off the freeway for a cup of coffee if it cost him a dollar pretty much proved Howard’s point to me.

So while I always appreciated the value and quality of Starbucks coffee, over the course of almost 22 years, I got used to paying $X for coffee. So now it’s difficult for me to see anything but those discounted prices as the appropriate cost of the product. And the overwhelming majority of the coffee I drank – all that I drank at the office and what I made at home with my free pound – were essentially free. And as the years went by, like a lot of Starbucks customers, I pretty much quit making coffee at home except for on weekends.

My new lifestyle calls for coffee just about every morning at home. I generally make caffe lattes – one with two shots of espresso for my wife and a second for myself, with four shots. (Rule of Thumb: A single shot of espresso has about 75 milligrams of caffeine, about double the amount in a can of Cola. Most things I’ve read suggest limiting daily caffeine intake to 600 milligrams. Check out http://tiny.cc/19gqL to learn more, including how many Kit Kat bars or cans of Red Bull it’d take to kill you.)

My weekly demand for coffee at home is about 294 grams (6 shots x 7 grams x 7 days.) At $10 a pound, (at the low end of regular pricing for good coffee,) that’s about $6.50 a week for coffee beans, and coincidentally about what it would cost for the drinks each day at Starbucks and its competitors. Which reminds me of the first moment during my time at Starbucks when I could see that the business was changing before our eyes. I was managing the store at University Village in Seattle, which was then (and remains) one of the highest volume stores in the portfolio. It was around 1989 or 90, during a time when we sold 1,000-1,400 pounds of coffee by the pound each week. On a Saturday morning, one of the busiest times of the week, a couple came in and ordered a half-pound of Espresso Roast, ground for their home espresso machine, and two double-tall lattes to drink while they shopped at the nearby grocery store. Their purchase totaled $8.20 -- $4.10 for the two drinks and $4.10 for the half pound of coffee. It struck me at that moment that people were happy to spend as much for something that would be gone before they got home as they were for something that would likely be fueling a week’s worth of early mornings. Today’s Starbucks store at University Village is about four times the size it was when I managed it, does probably three times the business, but sells a fraction as much coffee by the pound.

Coffee was only a small part of my life when I joined Starbucks. My wife and I moved to Seattle in 1985. Coffee was already a bigger deal in Seattle than it had been in Phoenix, but nothing like it would eventually become. We had acquired a small espresso machine for home use and frequented the espresso cart at Nordstrom. Up to the time I joined Starbucks, I probably would not have self-identified as a coffee drinker. I liked it alright, but even then I could tell a lot of it wasn’t any good. When I joined Starbucks and began learning about coffee, the taste and style of Starbucks became the lens through which I saw all coffee. That I had the opportunity over the years to really get to know coffee and learn about from the inside, from industry pioneers and in a really fun environment meant only solidified the notion that Starbucks = Coffee. Of course I knew there were other good coffees out there – few at first, then arguably fewer – but now, it seems safe to say there is more good coffee available in the US than any time in the last quarter century, if not longer.

Which brings me to the Espresso Dilemma. Starbucks Espresso Roast is a really terrific blend of coffee, and its taste is so imprinted in my brain and on my tongue that it’s hard to embrace much else. But I have to pay for it now – I bought a pound yesterday, for $10.45. That’s about 97 cents a day for our lattes at home, which is hard not to see as a bargain. Yet – when you’re used to free and you’re unemployed, $10.45 seems like a lot. And frankly, there is part of me that would like to see less of my money go to Starbucks right now. I loved my time there; it was terrific fun most of the time, and Starbucks gave me a chance to see huge chunks of the world and meet famous people. Even so, it’s fun to explore other coffees, and given all that has changed at Starbucks and the rest of the coffee world, saying Starbucks = Coffee no longer works for me.

And so I’ve been trying different coffees at home to make our daily lattes. I’ve acquired coffee in a number of different ways, and for lack of a better way to summarize my findings; I’ll group them by method of acquisition, which essentially revolves around price.

Free. When it comes to free, economists and marketers agree: price matters, and free is a price most people can live with. I count myself among those happy with free. So on a couple of occasions when former Starbucks colleagues have offered me a pound of coffee, I’ve chosen Espresso Roast and found myself in possession of one of my favorite things at one of my favorite prices.

One rainy spring morning, a friend and I headed out on a little tour of Seattle coffeehouses. We visited Café Vita on Capitol Hill here in Seattle and had a lovely time. One of the employees noticed us looking carefully at things, including bags of coffee stored in the retail area and he offered us a tour of the roastery and warehouse, both of which are located behind the café. It was terrific fun and he gave us each a bag of a new blend they’d just come out with, a sort of joint venture they have going with Theo Chocolates. It was a nice gesture and the blend worked nicely for my lattes at home. Theo is an interesting Seattle company, and their partnership with Café Vita is a perfect fit. You can read a bit more at http://tiny.cc/f0xDt.

Shortly after the coffeehouse tour, I was having coffee with another former colleague, Joe Fugere, owner of Tutta Bella Pizza in Seattle (and now Issaquah.) (www.tuttabella.com) Like both Joe and everything on the menu, the coffee at Tutta Bella is authentically Italian. (Joe is actually not Italian, but he is very authentic; based on the respect he enjoys from the Italian barista in the Columbia City restaurant and the surprising number of Italians coming in for coffee, he might as well be.) Joe uses Attibassi Espresso from Italy, which he and his team selected after trying just about every coffee around. Read a bit about the coffee here: http://tiny.cc/g8IiT. For a person of my background, using this coffee at home was nothing short of scandalous. Like most Italian espresso blends, this coffee includes some robusta beans. (Rule of Thumb: Over 70% of the coffee in the world is arabica, the generally-regarded-as-superior of the two commercially important species of coffee. But there’s plenty of bad arabica out there, and most lousy coffee in the US is lousy not because of robusta, but because of stale, cheap, crappy versions of the good stuff.)

I had a cappuccino at Tutta Bella, and it was carefully prepared, beautiful to look at, and very tasty. It was easy to tell that there was some robusta in the blend, but the claim that these beans add body and aid the formation of a lovely crema on top of the espresso clearly seems to be true. Both these things, along with Joe’s graciousness and the barista’s skill, made it easy to say yes when Joe offered me a bag of the coffee to use at home.

To be frank, I struggled with the coffee when I used it at home. The home machine I have, like all home machines, is no match for a great commercial unit like they have at Tutta Bella. (My home model is a fairly new machine Starbucks sold, the name of which I can’t even begin to conjure up…I do remember there was a big marketing push behind it and that some of the design work was apparently done by BMW.) It’s a decent and reliable machine, and the espresso shots made from the Attibassi beans looked beautiful. The taste, however, was a bit disconcerting to me. The flavor of the robusta beans is just plain foreign to me and I couldn’t get past it. My wife had no trouble with it, I should say, and that means quite a lot in that she takes her latte at more “normal” strength and is a pretty observant drinker. (In fact, her strongest negative reaction to date has been the morning I opened a fresh bag of Starbucks – she found it harsh compared to whatever we’d drunk the prior day.)

To this point, the answer to the price/value question is a resounding “Duh”: Free coffee is good, at least when you know the people I do. There are no doubt gifts of coffee out there so heinous that I would not drink them; however, I believe that receiving a gift graciously is a mark of maturity, as is knowing what to do with gifts others may make better use of.

Not free. After carefully researching the matter, I’ve come to the conclusion that all coffee is either free or it’s not free. The price of free coffee seems to be fixed at $0.00. (I wonder if we need the government to investigate this. Collusion?) There is WAY more price variability in coffee that is not free, largely due to the ongoing practice of price discounting in grocery stores.

I’m fond of grocery shopping, all things considered. I rarely go more than a few days without at least a quick trip to the store—I prefer to buy produce no more than a day or two before its intended use, and when I’m cooking dinner, I don’t generally plan the meal several days in advance. (You never know what you’re going to be in the mood for, and when you have the luxury of time, it makes sense to use it.) So now that I have to buy most of my coffee, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking coffee prices regularly.

There is pretty much always something on sale, either in the bulk bins or within the packaged coffee selections. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just too much risk involved in buying coffee from the bins in grocery stores – the risk of stale coffee just seems too great. Not only is it impossible to know how long the coffee has been in the bins, it’s unclear to me how fresh the coffee they use to refill the bins really is. And even good coffee tastes lousy when it’s stale.

Most of the pre-packaged coffee in grocery stores is sold in 12-ounce bags. I know that a one pound bag (16 ounces / 454 grams) of Starbucks Espresso Roast costs $10.45 at a Starbucks store. That’s just sixty-five cents an ounce, so unless I am getting something really good or paying a very low price, the one-pounder at Starbucks is my default. The coffees I like – such as Peet’s, (Major Dickason’s Blend, sold for $13.95/lb at Peet’s stores; www.peets.com) some of Café Vita’s blends (especially Café Luna, sold for $13.50/lb in their café; www.cafevita.com) and a few others, are usually $9.99-11.99 for the 12-ounce bag. This translates to $13.32 to $15.98 per pound. So basically, the threat of a crushing caffeine withdrawal-induced headache is the only rational reason for me to pay for coffee if it’s not “on deal,” as they say in the grocery trade.

If I can buy coffee I know I like for sixty-five cents an ounce, I shouldn’t pay more than $7.80 for a 12-ounce bag. Given how grocers price things, $7.99 is the price I’m usually looking for. So any price that is >0 and <$8.00 will usually entice me to buy multiple units of a coffee I know I like. It’s obviously possible to spend much more or much less on coffee than sixty-five cents an ounce. Do either at your own peril, however.

Finally, having worked through this exercise, I realize that I know longer have a dilemma. I know what I like, how much I need, and what I’m comfortable paying for it. I shall now apply these same principles to our health care dilemma. Don’t hold your breath.