Wake up Coffee House Owners. There is a group who spend a lot of
money. The Passing-Through-Town Peddlers. And we have special needs.
Salespeople are a unique constituency of the Coffeehouse
Culture. We roam. Yeah, we may have
a “home-office” coffeehouse like every other remote worker, but we spend a whole lot of time on the
road, which means we are short term guests in foreign shops. We pop into a coffeehouse
wherever we are. We get done whatever needs to be done. Then we disappear.
I visit 75 different coffee shops a year in 15
cities. I spend money in all of them. I go back to the good shops. I never
return to the lame ones. It is easy to
ignore me because you do not see me much – but I am part of a large guild of traveling
coffee-drinkers. There are lots of us, entering everyday a new coffeehouse in a
new city. We are not looking for the sociability
and community elements of Coffeehouse Culture. We are looking for a corner with
table space and accessible Internet. We buy coffee (caffeine) and pastry
(sugar) because we are stressed-out maniacs. We do this all the time, repeatedly,
all day. We just want space – can’t you keep a reserved
“peddler” section that has a one-hour time limit? Can you make easy to figure out the WiFi password (or better yet, just let people connect?) A lot of us have MiFi
devices…but we forget them. And for
my sake…can’t you have a nice slice of apple pie available to purchase? Bad bagels and stale coffeecakes just don’t
do it.
