Seattle Coffee Works

We’ve seen some truly amazing people walk through the doors of the Seattle Coffee Works café. From architects to students, city planners to night-shifters, we’ve met them all. The quality of character never ceases to amaze us.

This year, one of our ambitious and loving customers is planning to amaze us again since she began training for her second half-marathon. Adrienne Anderson will be competing in the BMO Vancouver Marathon this May in honor of her mother who died of Hodgkins Lymphoma in 2006. Her goal is to raise $3,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Adrienne asked us to help her meet her goal this year. So to show our support we created the Northwest Runners Blend, pledging to donate 15% of each purchase to her cause.

We’re inspired by Adrienne’s perseverance and hope she can inspire you, too. So while she’s pounding pavement to find a cure for Leukemia and Lymphoma, you can support her efforts with us at Seattle Coffee Works.

You can also read more about Adrienne’s training adventures here.

Katie and I will be at the Burke Museum this Saturday 11-2 for a sampling of three of our favorite origins.

Come on by if you have time.

The wonderful folks at the Museum even made a flier to announce the occasion. 

A while back we repriced everything in our store so that *after* tax all prices ended in quarter increments: x.00/x.25/x.50/x.75. The new pricing structure has worked very well. We have been able to increase our speed of service without giving up one bit of quality. The bean-counter guy also noted that our daily cash reconciliation has become almost error-free because of this small change. 

We also got rid of another nuisance: we don’t EVER need any more rolled pennies, nickels, or dimes from the bank. We thought we’d found the solution to all change-bank issues. Alas, the ordeal wasn’t over.

While we weren’t returning any coins other than quarters to our customers, our customers gave us all their change — maybe a by-product of their general economic woes. Nowadays we seem to see at least one customer a day who pays for her entire coffee with coins. Because we have no outlet for the small change, time and again we find our till overflowing with … pennies. We’re talking hundreds of pennies. Counting pennies at the day’s closing went from being a small chore to a major time sink.

From my days in the field of industrial supplies I remembered that the folks in the warehouse never counted all those little screws, nails, grommets, and sprockets. It was much faster to weigh them. Yesterday, our own little weight-to-count-conversion spreadsheet went live. The counting of coins which used to take 300+ seconds every night has become a weighing of coins. Time used to weigh / count 1,500 coins: 54 seconds. Yahoo! 

Next we need to find a funnel to put all those loose pennies into little paper rolls; and off they go to the bank.

Photo Credit: Frog Museum

I hope no one is surprised to read that we think that our coffee is the finest there is. We’re constantly cupping new green coffees and trying out new blends; we’re also continuing to tweak our roast profiles to bring out the best in each of the coffees. If you disagree let’s at least state that we’re trying REALLY hard.

But does it matter?

We’ve long found that our ability to sell a coffee has a lot to do with what the label says. For instance, our variation of the Mocha Java, the Obama Blend, has been one of our best-sellers ever since we introduced it last November; when we renamed our Atlantic Blend into Seattle Sunrise, we immediately saw a significant up tick in sales of the very same coffee. 

The big packaged-good companies know the drill much better than we do: a can of cola consists mostly of very expensive aluminum packaging filled with water and sugar and trace amounts of flavor, color and caffeine. Most shelves in a regular supermarket are full of this kind of stuff: it’s all about the art of selling an inferior product with the help of expensive and good-looking packaging. Wall Street types, immune to immoralities such as endangering half the nation with obesity, have made great money with this deceptive practice. It also comes as no surprise that our corporate competition in the coffee business, the one with the green logo, has a number of consumer-good veterans on its board.

Even though we’ve smelled the success potential of good packaging, we’ve concentrated most of our efforts on the stuff that’s inside the bag. Turns out, there is a chance we might be working in vain. In an experiment at MIT, participants were asked to describe the smell of rose pedals concealed in two separate paper bags. One bag had a positive label on it, along the lines of “deliciously fragrant roses;” the other said something about lawn clippings. To everyone involved the first bag smelled much better than the second. What gives?

Is possibly Katie’s artful description the real reason why we have a hard time keeping our delicious Sulawesi Toraja in stock?

Photo Credit: Shabby Chic 

I know it’s lame to not have reported this earlier on this page – yet we ARE indeed moving. We have leased 107 Pike Street (former Johnny Rockets), and we’ll have both more space for our coffee experience project and, yes yes yes, a roastery!

The roaster is being made as we’re speaking, so far all is on track. Here is a first picture of the place which shows our friend Eduardo toiling away on the floor removal.

A BIG THANK YOU to Bill, Daryl, Bruce, Axel, Eduardo, Valli, Pipo, and everyone else who’s generously chipped in with the demolition; and also a very BIG THANK YOU to Kristi, Katie, Eric, and Brooke, who’ve kept the 111 Pike store running. Next week we’ll be starting with some beautiful new construction. Stay tuned!