As I was working this morning in one of my local coffee shops…
Everyone entering was so happy to see each other, a pleasant morning of small talk and exchanged greetings with friends, co-workers and neighbors as they “coffee-d” up for the start of the day. You cannot re-created this kind of community at the injected molded plastic world of over stuffed couches, green paint and swing hipster music which has become a mindless ritual. Or the new coffee ritual observed by millions across the country, sitting in their cars with windows rolled down, yelling at the aluminium box as a returned barking voice repeats our order.
No, no a small vanilla coffee with two sugars, please!!!
OK I got it – a large latte with a small apple pie, that will be $6.03, thank you.
Do you need sugar for your coffee or how about trying one of our 1600 calorie breakfast sandwiches?
Dear Lord, help me. Give me strength. Please I would like to order…
It was amazing, my little local coffee shop has a genuine happy vibe of a real and living community, growing and sprinkled with laughing, chatting and personal contact.
The true social connections. No tweets or twits selling magic creme and systems. And it was obviously important to these people, arriving and to be involved, all the while enjoying a hot and steaming latte. Tucked in a little strip of heaven located on Church Street, a “mom and poppish” street in the heart of Vienna, Virginia filled with the shops of the future. Alive and thriving, sometimes hiring.
Small shops are popping up everywhere here in the sleepy suburbs of Washington, DC. The future is bright for the small local shops all over DC because of huge government spending, consulting and employment. I digress.
These shops are filling a need abandoned for the last decade by franchises and large multi-national organization and corporations. A lost couple of decades in which “big box” became the norm, faceless experiences of predictability have become the routine and the quirky shops filled with personality were left in the dust. A foggy familiarity has grown for over the decades maybe consumers are tiring of the bland predictability of service, style and repetitive stale products.
The new local small coffee shop, Caffe Amouri, It’s a thriving vibrant new business, why is that? It’s all about local and the reemergence of the shop-around-the-corner.
Should be fun to see the long term results, I’ve had this feeling for the last three or four years, that the days of the large multi-national big box is sitting at the tippy top of the retail mountain with only one direction go, down.
We shall see?
If your business, organization, corporation or one person shop doesn’t possess local, better get busy creating a truthful connection of community or you might miss the most important trend of the next decade.
Cheers, Stella.
