Coffee Logic
I don't pretend to know much of anything regarding business. I don't have a degree in marketing and nor am I affiliated in any sense of the word with the business community. However, along with many other armchair quarterbacks, every once in awhile something peaks my curiosity enough to question the logistics and the thought processes of particular businesses.

I've written previously about coffeeshops for various reasons, and I'm not sure what causes them to continuously provide fodder for thought. Apparently, they serve as some sort of nexus or ground zero for the testing of marketing ideas that stretch across a wide strata of areas and differing approaches to lure in that ideal customer. I think I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to the diversifying tactics coffeeshop owners employ, and that's saying a lot considering that this medium size big city, Pittsburgh, has a certain finite amount of growth available for burgeoning businesses. Coffeeshops here are abundant. Almost circuslike in their approach, the varying array of enticements offered by coffeeshops seems endless in imagination and tact. I'm not sure how well they are received, and I'd be curious to know how many ventures are abandoned wholeheartedly after a brief trial run without success. There's only so much you can do to attract people, and there's only so much people will be willing to endure in order to obtain a simple cup of coffee. Case in point, one of my favorite shops, the Beehive, went through a radical transformation and expansion scheme that seems to only have as its end purpose the engulfing of the entire city block in which it is located. I was on a forced leave from the shop, but I've since returned to its confines with positive results.

Recently, the Southside Works has begun opening new businesses in an effort to revitalize a once empty, unprofitable chunk of land. The effort, which can only be described as the opening salvo in what promises to be a large scale battle between rival shopping complexes, has yielded one curiosity, two coffeeshops within a block of one another. Sure, on the outset that doesn't seem strange when in this town rival shops are on opposite corners, but what makes this an oddity is that the location itself is on, what I would term, the outskirts of the Southside. There isn't much roadway left before you exit a developed area and enter the forested in-between wasteland that separates the Southside from Homestead. In other words, the location is something that can only sustain itself by continuously feeding its competing retailers to each other. So the two coffeeshops are forced to compete for, what I would assume to be, a limited amount of pedestrian traffic and the business derived from the office inhabitants surrounding the complex, which I don't believe to be that numerous.

Quite possibly, the most puzzling aspect of this is that one shop, Crazy Mocha, which beat its rival, Caribou Coffee, opened first, starts the day at six in the morning! Running past this empty establishment, I couldn't help but wonder who they thought they would be serving at this early of an hour when no other shops close by are open. Residential housing isn't nearby, and the always burdensome aspect of parking seems to rule out anyone stopping in on their way to work. Like I said, I don't claim to understand business, but when this very same chain closes a shop in the heart of the University of Pittsburgh's campus, one has to wonder who is making the decisions here and for what reason. I drink a lot of coffee, but I wouldn't want to have to sell it if my life depended on it based on the backwards logic implied by the strategies employed by the shillers of the bean.

"Won't get fooled again"
I'll admit it. I fell for it, and it's one of those insidious pranks that rankles my pride everytime I think about it. Standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change in my favor as a pedestrian, I noticed a quarter on the pavement. Bending over to pick it up, I was shocked to find that it wouldn't move, not an inch. Someone with a really twisted and demented sense of humor had gone to the trouble of gluing the quarter to the sidewalk. Afterwards, my only thought was that my actions, along with countless others I'm sure, had provided this very person with a day's worth of guffawing as he or she peered out of a window from a nearby vantage point.

Having suffered this cruelty once, I've since greeted most such chance occurrences with a healthy sense of skepticism. So, as I was preparing to start my run and nearing my starting point, I happened to notice in a bus shelter a large stack of VHS tapes, perhaps twenty or so stacked in unequal distribution on the pavement and the edge of the shelter's bench. I told myself to keep walking, but I slowed up long enough to catch that written in crude lettering on the spine of one tape was "XXX," a rather awkward way to label a tape which I assumed had it actually contained the type of content the marking is associated with it would be hidden away with all the other materials. Regardless, I just kept moving. Again, the fear crept up inside of me that anyone who took even a moment longer in their curiosity, would be doing nothing more than providing someone with innumerable kicks.

Yesterday, I passed the very same bus shelter. To no surprise of my own, the tapes were all gone, whether they were picked up by city workers or unsuspecting citizens, I'll never know.

"When the going gets weird..."
I resisted the urge to post immediately on the day that the news broke that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide for a number of reasons, number one being that it seemed like a poor decision that wouldn't allow the necessary act of reflection. He's someone whose work I enjoy, some of it tremendously so, but I'm of the opinion that the majority of his work has little or no relevance to certain people my age, especially his reporting on politics. Most of the lamentations on Thompson have made a point of saying that his best work was behind him, and there's definitely a case to be made for such an accusation. However, it seems to me that he's been in a funk for quite some time, possibly starting as early as the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's downfall.

I find that a lot of his work, especially those collections of political writings from the eighties, is nearly unreadable for someone my age that at the time was so far removed from the political process as to make it irrelevant. Most of the characters he's commenting on are faceless to me, even with a profound interest in politics. Nixon was his target, and there seemed to be something, for lack of a better word, magical in the way in which all the events of the sixties and seventies (Nixon, Vietnam, Civil Rights) all coalesced at one time to create a country on the verge of something both sinister and strange. Thompson's best work reflected this uncertainty perfectly, and he was the perfect spokesperson for the counterculture. He seemed like the real deal, not a poseur like Tom Wolfe. With Nixon gone, it seemed as if he lacked a real target for his rage. Even during the eighties with Reagan in power, there seemed to be a real lack of moral corruptness for Thompson to vent on. Bush Sr. just doesn’t seem to warrant much comment at all, positive or negative, and Clinton, obviously, wasn't a target in the least. With the election of our current administration headed by another Bush and fraught with moral corruptness, abuses of power, and tighter than ever restrictions on free speech and civil rights, this seemed like the perfect time for Thompson to return to form firing shotgun blasts at enemies big and small. All the same adjectives that Thompson coined in labeling Nixon a monster could easily apply to Bush and Co.

I don’t actually think that Thompson suffered from a lack of ideas or viable targets. I do believe that his writing was affected, as so many others obviously were, by the events of September 11. Even though he thrived during the period where many, many more lives were lost in another unnecessary war, the events of that day seem much more personal, and the response by our leaders seemed to be greeted both as warranted and overreaching. The type of writing that Thompson uses to skewer his targets may not have been the best way to criticize the government. I’m not advocating the notion that he shouldn’t have written in his trademark style about Bush; in fact, I wished that he would have written more. What I do think is that, and this should come as no surprise, we live in a different time than the seventies. The types of events and the disgust generated at them and the government are definitely similar in vein and intensity, but they’re different somehow. Somehow this isn’t the same as the seventies. Vietnam isn’t equivalent to September 11, and Nixon isn’t equivalent to Bush. In the end, I don’t think Thompson lacked anything relevant to write about or lost his nerve in aiming squarely at the forces that enraged him the most. His death will remain a mystery and the no amount of speculation or criticism will change that fact. Let it be said, that his voice, regardless of intensity and affect, will be missed by many.

News Break
I'm slowly but surely ending my self-imposed embargo on all things related to NPR. I realized several weeks ago that I'd hit the proverbial wall with regards to the news. Between digesting each day's New York Times, whose reading times can vary between thirty minutes to more than an hour, the stream of NPR programs I can hear at work, and all the various other sources of news, I knew it was time for a break. I always seem to regret doing this because I know I'm going to be skimming over important stories that, should they become truly relevant, will leave me with only a cursory understanding. It just so happens that I was in one of those phases where reading books had become the most important thing to me, and I couldn't justify using that time to pour over news stories that increasingly seem to be cut and paste jobs adding reports on new developments to rehashings of older news. As always, I slowly come out of this funk with a renewed interest and start devouring the paper with a renewed sense of urgency and interest.

My problems with NPR stem from a long standing view of mine that they are stridently biased towards devoting vast amounts of time to stories that fit their own agenda, and thus making it increasingly hard for me to listen willingly without feeling manipulated. As with my other funk, I felt that it was time to give NPR another chance. As luck would have it, my decision to turn the dial back to WDUQ just happened to coincide with yet another round of what I call begging, or in their parlance a pledge drive. These pledge drives are what sucks the very life out of listening to the radio. And it's so obvious when they have one going on. The stories seem rushed, the announcers are talking faster, and then out of nowhere here it comes, a pledge solicitation. The most annoying aspect are the lame testimonials and quasi-demands to donate. These are most often associated with Ira Glass, whose pretentious air seems to ooze from his pours through the microphone and out through your speaker. None of these tactics ever make me feel as if I need to pledge.

Finally someone has broken the silence I have suffered in for far too long. A Rant in the current issue of the City Paper hits on so many points and provides such a dead-on critique of the state of DUQ that I wish I could just reproduce the entire column here. To summarize, it seems that Dan Goldberg, a longtime member of DUQ, has grown frustrated by the lack of improvements that result from these increasingly frequent pledge drives. They have apparently picked up some more national content from NPR, but I couldn't tell you what that is, and the local content still sounds the same, as if it were produced in a senior high-school. The most poignant remark Goldberg makes, though, is reserved for DUQ's musical selection that resumes once they've completed their allotment of NPR programming, which he refers to as "all elevator jazz, almost all the time."

Goldberg also makes another observation, which is both the most telling and troubling for stations like DUQ. Anyone with a decent internet connection now has access to many, many stations from around the country whose programming puts DUQ's to shame. Every time I have the chance to listen to the news on my computer at work, I find that I never even think for a moment of connecting to DUQ. Instead, I turn to NJN, a New Jersey station with a steady stream of NPR programming without terrible jazz and professionally produced local content. DUQ, which seems to want to care about the community, can't do so without a more concerted effort to create programming that's worth listening to and making improvements that are noticeable in both content and quality.