One of the things we think about all the time is how to create and maintain a sense of community at our coffeehouse.  One of the main strengths of San Francisco is its reputation for having a strong sense of community and for being a city that cares.  My family's goal in opening Coffee to the People was for it to be a center for our neighborhood community, a quintessential San Francisco coffeehouse that respects what the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood stands for. So I was a little saddened when I recently received an e-mail from someone who found our cafe, and indeed our city, lacking in that very sense of community.

Are we becoming more self-absorbed, preferring to live our intellectual lives through the windowpane of our notebook computers or holed up in books instead of interacting with our neighbors and others who come to this neighborhood looking for real, warm-blooded, face-to-face, human interaction?

What do you think Coffee to the People can do to foster a stronger sense of community and social interaction for those who visit our shop? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Meanwhile, this heart-felt message, and my response (both dated November 4, 2006), may be of interest. Here is the message:

hey folks,

I think your coffee house is totally cool, I really love the things you people stand for (as stated in your "Philosphy"), as well as the way you've decorated the place, but I don't think I'm ever coming back there again. Not because of anything your establishment did, or is responsible for -but because as is always the case whenever i go to a coffee house in the City I think should be a real cool place where people come to get together, socialize, and just give love to each other, this turns out NOT to be the case. In the hour or so that I was there today, tho I made it a point to sit in what should have been a kind of "community area", as soon as anyone else sat down, they'd bury their nose in either a book, or whip out a laptop, or put a pair of headphones on. The only time people ever intereacted was if they already knew each other prior to arriving. AS is always the case here in Berkeley, people did not interact with anyone outside of theri own race. Say what you'd like about the Bay areas supposed "diversity'" -as a person who is Bi-racial, I'll tell you it's not what they make it out to be. i"m fed up with going into places where such a large emphasis is (supposedly) put on overcoming this type of behavior, only to find out it is much to the contrary.

I know that you cannot "Make" people interact with others outside thier own race or be more freindly, but is there anyway at all you might be able to rectify this situation?

I love your coffee house very much, and would hate to have to put it off forever.

IF nothing else, they need to be reminded about a lot of the things the Haight stood for in the 60's!

Thank You.

--------------------------------------------

My response:

Thank you so much for your message. My first, quick appeal is that if you haven’t left the area yet, we actually have a social night tonight, our monthly “Game Night” that starts in less than 1 hour (7 pm) – I am going to try to be there for it, although I have a childcare issue I am still trying to resolve tonight.

If you can’t make it, or just don’t want to, I understand. I have to say it saddens me to hear someone looking for a sense of community and not finding it at our coffeehouse, because that is the main reason my family opened the cafe a year ago. I agree that in our laptop age, it is a little off-putting sometimes to come and sit only to find a “group” of people who have decided to each have his or her own individual experience instead of interacting with others. It really depends on the particular set of people that comes in at any time. Personally, I think a coffeehouse should be a place where someone can come in and just read a book or study or use their computer – sometimes. But it should also be a place people come together to meet each other, talk, laugh, debate, create, and learn more about each other, and often in San Francisco these days we are a little too self-involved to do that.

When I was at the shop a little bit ago today, I noticed a couple of people playing chess, and another small group talking, but I was a little surprised how many computers where out and faces buried, which isn’t what I would prefer on a weekend. We have been contemplating changing our policy on weekend afternoons to shut down the wireless and put up signs announcing the time as “social hour” for the very reasons you have noted. We are a little worried about the blow-back, but if you visit the shop in a couple of months you might see that we have taken that step – your e-mail has served as a strong plea to push that idea to the forefront.

Beyond that, I do want you to know that at Coffee to the People we think constantly about how to be the best community coffeehouse we can be. To that end, we have set up several regular community social events:

• Every Tuesday night is an open mic where anyone in the community can come play or listen to live acoustic music
• The 1^st Saturday night of each month is Game Night from 7 - 10 pm, where we invite everyone to come play games and hang out. It is often loud and fun, although some months it is a little more happening than others.
• The 1^st & 3^rd Mondays of the month we have a knitting group open to the public
• Every other Sunday at 10 am we have a children’s story hour
• Most months we have at least one or two special events, often with musical guests

All of our events are free, and we have been looking for more of them, so long as we find someone who seems passionate and good about keeping the event running on a regular basis.

I love the Haight. I live here with my family over on Ashbury Street, and I started the coffeehouse with my sister, wife, parents, and in-laws because I felt that we didn’t really have a place in our neighborhood that served as a true gathering place for our community (and that had good coffee and cared about the environment). I feel like we failed you today, and I am sorry. I am a member of the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, and I see people there that definitely remind me of what this neighborhood stood for in the 1960s, and I can see a lot of those ideals live on today around here. Some of those people are regulars at our shop, and my dream is to make Coffee to the People into a place where you could come and feel at home with these people. We will keep working on it. In the meantime, I hope you don’t completely give up on San Francisco. In any big city there are many types of people, and I hope that one day you will wander back into our coffeehouse and find what you (and I) have been looking for all along.

Yours truly,

Bob Harkins

What do you think?  Should we implement a "social hour" (or social hours) on weekend afternoons, shutting down the wifi and encouraging people to actually talk with each other?   What other things can we do to bring out our neighborhood's sense of community?

Owning a coffeeshop in the Haight comes with its own unique set of challenges. Prominent among these is how best to handle our mentally ill customers.

In general, our approach is very hands off. While individuals suffering from mental illness may behave oddly in comparison to other people (staring into space, talking to themselves, making nonsensical statements), they are almost always harmless, so we extend the same welcome to them as we extend to everyone else.

That being said, however,  we have to draw a line when it comes to disturbing others. If someone is behaving in a manner that upsets our other guests, we must intervene. This happened the other day and Maddi Wu commented on it in her blog:

there was an incident where one of the employees told a woman to leave and that she could only come back the next day.  hmmm, i sure hope the employee had a good reason because you would think that a cafe with social justice pasted across its walls would uphold that within the confines of its store.

Ms. Wu was right to be concerned. Asking a customer to leave the store is a pretty drastic move and it should only be undertaken under special circumstances.

In this case, the person involved was a regular customer of ours who appears to suffer from untreated schizophrenia. Most of the time she keeps to herself, but lately she has been approaching other customers and touching them on the knee. We're not sure if she does this to get their attention or to check if they are real or what, but whatever her reasons, it is freaking people out. On one day alone we had five people get up and leave the coffeeshop because she wouldn't/couldn't keep her hands to herself.

Initially we dealt with this problem simply by asking her to stop. We found that worked, briefly. All too often, though, she was back touching people 20 minutes later. Sadly, although she understands that she shouldn't touch people and is always very apologetic about it afterward, she just can't seem to help herself.

Our new strategy is to use a one chance a day policy. Everyday she is welcome to come into our store as long as she doesn't touch anybody. If she does start touching people though, she has to leave for that day, but is free to come back the next day and try again.

I think this a pretty reasonable policy, but we have yet to see if it will work. If you have other ideas about how to handle this situation in a sensitive manner, let me know. In the meantime, if this particular customer happens to approach you and place a hand on your knee, don't worry--she does that to everyone. Just ask her nicely to stop and she'll go away.

Recently CTTP received a communication from another person concerned about the meat on our menu. The letter read in part:

I came across your website and reviews on Yelp -- it sounds like a lovely place and I would love to patronize your business. I do have a couple of concerns, however. I know that you are committed to human rights and environmental issues, but what about animal rights? I noticed that there is a fair amount of meat on your menu. Is this meat organic? Certified humane? As you probably know, in addition to being cruel, factory farming of animals is extremely detrimental to the environment.I am interested in learning more about how, as a business which is concerned with ethical issues surrounding production of your goods, you address these important issues.

I sent an email back outlining our stand on this issue and reiterating our commitment to a long-term transition to organic sandwiches. We received the following email in response:

Dear Ms. Tamerius,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate your candor with regards to this issue. I also find it admirable that you posted an article about this matter on your public blog.

Although I understand your reasoning for not serving organic meat, I believe there are few acceptable justifications for supporting factory farmed meat -- perhaps starvation is the only one. The damage this industry does to the environment and disrespect and cruelty it shows to other life-forms should make anyone remotely concerned about these issues steer clear of the industry. Perhaps you have not explored the variety of vegetarian sandwiches that are available. By switching to a vegetarian menu, you would also gain the loyalty of the thousands of vegetarians who live in this city. Vegetarian restaurants like Herbivore and Cafe Gratitude are widely popular, often packed way beyond their capacity.

I urge you to take the lead in becoming a slightly-more-perfect ethical business. Although fair-trade coffee is an important issue, it is also currently a trendy issue, one that guarantees a casually concerned San Francisco audience. However, these same "environmentalists" may eat sandwiches whose production caused just as much, if not more, damage to humans, animals, and the environment.  But since the issue is not trendy, local cafes do not capitalize on its power. By making this part of your mission statement, you could help spread awareness about a little-discussed yet incredibly important cause. I have faith in your ability to reconcile these business and ethical concerns.

At first I was a bit irked by the letter because it seemed to question the importance of the fair trade movement and implied that we and our customers don't really care about issues of social and environmental justice.  But once I thought about it some more, I realized that she was touching on another important issue, one that a values-led business must struggle with everyday: which values matter more?

CTTP does a lot of great things for our community: we serve only fair trade and organic coffee, we donate our left over foodstuffs to the homeless, our baristas donate 3% of their tips to CoffeeKids, we have a plan to donate 10% of our profits to environmental and social justice organizations (assuming we ever make a profit), we pay for our employees to have health insurance, and we pay our employees higher than minimum wage.

But let's face it: we have a long way to go before we become the type of business we want to be. Putting aside the meat issue for a moment, what about the fact that we're still using plastic lids on our to go cups? And why are our paper cups and toilet paper bleached white? And why aren't we using non-polluting wind power to run our electrical appliances? And what about our cleaning products? And our water usage?

The fact is, we can't do all of the socially and environmentally responsible things we want to do (at least not yet), so we have to make decisions between them. For us, fair trade is a more important issue than animal rights, and so we have made that our priority.

As always, we are open to persuasion on this issue, but it seems to me that rather than get into an internecine war between environmentalists about whose cause is more important, it would be far better to work together to make sure all of our causes are achieved as rapidly as possible.

Toward this goal, I repeat my call for help in making the transition to more socially and environmentally responsible sandwiches: where can we find distributors of organic, family farmed goods at an affordable price?

The other day we received a passionate and strongly worded letter from a customer imploring us to stop serving meat. The letter touched on an issue that we struggle with every day at Coffee to the People:  how to be a socially and environmentally responsible business while still staying in business.  It read, in part:

. . .  I was really dispointed to see meat on your menu. As you may know, slaughterhouses are by far the most dangerous workplace in the country, and the meat industry deliberately hires workers who are desperately poor, don't speak English, are there illegally, or otherwise will not stand up against these working conditions for fear of losing their job or being deported. . . By buying meat, we support these practices and this industry, unless we take tremendous care where the meat is produced.

As you also likely know, factory farms absolutely devastate neighboring ecosystems and communities, polluting the water, land, and air with the thousands of tons of waste these densely packed animals produce. The communities of people who live around these factory farms are almost all poor, and environmental racism is often at work.

Finally, the way the animals are treated on modern factory farms and slaughterhouses is nothing short of horrific. I encourage you to watch a video about this (just 13 minutes long) at www.meetyourmeat.com to see for yourself if you have not recently done so. Castration, dehorning, debeaking, taildocking, branding, de-toeing . . . and more all happen with no painkillers, and (with the exception of beef production) virtually all of these animals are confined indoors so tightly that they can't even turn around or spread their wings, let alone go outside or do what is natural for them.

. . . I appreciate the delicious vegan options you have, but . . . I see having a few vegan options as analogous to a coffeehouse with organic and/or fair-trade coffee just as an option, among a dozen other options that are not organic or fair trade, sending the message that these values need not be important for everyone. . .

The letter makes a number of excellent points about the terrible state of the meat industry in the United States and about the importance of businesses like ours not contributing to the perpetuation of these practices. However, we disagree with the letter writer about how best to address this issue. 

In particular, we don't believe that eating meat is inherently wrong, but that many of the practices used in the meat industry are problematic. Therefore, rather than not serve meat at all, our goal is to provide meat that is produced under more humane conditions.

That being said, however, we must admit to compromising on this issue to some extent in order to meet our bottom line. When we began designing sandwiches for CTTP, there was a considerable amount of discussion among the owners about what we could and could not afford to do. Unfortunately, we quickly realized that although all organic sandwiches made with meat from family farms were the ideal, we would have to charge more than $10 per sandwich to make ends meet and it didn't take an economist to realize that amount was more than our customers would ever be willing or able to pay. At the same time, however, we didn't believe the market for vegetarian and vegan sandwiches alone would be sufficient to cover our costs either.

After much debate, we came up with the following compromise: we would serve sandwiches made with high-quality but affordable ingredients until such time as we established a large enough sandwich business to take advantage of economies of scale in the purchase of organic goods from family farms. In other words, we have committed ourselves to a long-term transition to environmentally and socially responsible sandwiches.

Admittedly, this situation is far from ideal, but we think it is  better to be an imperfect socially and responsible business than to be no business at all.

For those customers who are interested in accelerating our transition to environmentally and socially sound sandwiches, we would love to have your help. One major barrier for us in providing our ideal sandwiches has been a lack of suppliers for organic goods who will deliver small orders at an affordable price. If you know of progressive distributors who might be willing to take a chance on a small business like ours, please let us know.