Double Blind

For some reason my mind keeps going back to the note that was left on the door, from my previous post.

One of the comments left in the article was the following:

Posted by: Chris at February 13, 2006 12:05 PM

Its not the first time something like this happened. I used to be the night manager at the Blenz at broadway/granville, and I quit along with some other employee’s due to the owner’s blatent disregard for Canadian labor laws and health code. Blenz simply doesn’t regulate its frandchise properly. If you have the money, you can buy one and bend the rules to your liking.

Word of advice, don’t go to the Broadway and Granville location. I believe it is still owned and operated by Rosa Kim. Reasons? Rats in the back, coffee is brewed and served until the container is empty (sits on heater for 6+hrs at times), they serve bread that “looks” like it can still be eaten (2+ weeks old), she doesn’t give employee’s breaks, schedules them for shifts they cant work, gives little to no raises off minimum wage. I was a evening manager doing cash outs and closings and was only paid $8.20/hr, and I had to put up with the gripes from the customers complaining about moldy bread and lousy coffee, as well as my fellow employees being treated unfairly.

Myself and a few other employee’s quit and told the owner, Rosa, to let us leave in peace or else we’d report her to the better business bureau and the health inspectors. Tried calling Blenz head office to complain about the situation and all they said was “Does Rosa know you’re doing this? We’re going to have to let her know”

Shocked but pleasantly surprised to see that uprising’s can happen at other Blenz locations. Maybe the company will start acting in a more respectable manner now and regulate. Some of the drinks taste pretty good, but whats the point if they’re presented in a pile of $hit.

Although I don’t go out to them very often, I do like coffee shops as they serve as an excellent venue to unwind and socialize one-on-one or in small groups. Typically the decision where to go is motivated by location, rather than any preference between Starbucks, Blenz, the Second Cup or some other independently owned shop.

Now to my recollection, the two times that I ever ordered a non-coffee product at a Blenz place (usually some square pastry consisting of nuts, sugar and other dentally damaging ingredients) I wasn’t very satisfied at the quality of the product, they were rock-hard, which implies they’ve probably been sitting out on the shelf too long. Considering that they are very high margin products (in comparison to the cost to manufacture), I would expect something of higher quality than what I received (mainly it being quite hard and stale). Hearing comments like the above makes me correlate my previous experiences with the comments itself. I have no idea whether the comment is truthful or not, but I have no reason to believe the person writing the comment was lying.

As a result, my consumer behaviour is actually changed – if I was given a decision to go to a coffee shop, I would probably exclude Blenz from my selection if there were other alternatives around the meeting location. Preferably I would like going to an independent shop rather than a mainstream label place, but given a choice between the “big three”, the article actually had a material impact on my future consumer purchasing decisions. The probability of me spending coffee money in Blenz has considerably lowered.

I wonder if other consumers think in the same way – my line of thinking is very indirect, but this is where the art of marketing comes into play. Whether they anticipated it or not, the writers of the note on the door caused a chain of events to happen that affected the future buying decision of me and probably others with respect to Blenz.

On a side note, Starbucks has learned from the very beginning that it’s very difficult to keep customers happy if you have unhappy employees serving them. Starbucks apparently treats their employees very well and considering that they’ve delivered results for their shareholders, it looks like it was a winning strategy, something that Blenz has yet to learn.

A final footnote – What’s ironic is that this has little to do with the coffee, which follows a fairly strict formula for preparing. Essentially a latte is a certain amount of boiling water processed through a measured amount of freshly ground dry coffee grains (approximately 2 tablespoons of ground coffee per 150mL of water); on the side, milk is streamed and flavouring (vanilla, hazelnut, etc.) is added; at the end the coffee/water mix goes into the milk and stirred, perhaps adding some whipping cream on top. All coffee shops have the necessary equipment and raw supplies to produce an identical cup of coffee, so coffee should be a commodity item and priced as such. Instead, the consumer pays 4 bucks for a cup of coffee that costs about 30 cents to prepare, the majority of the cost being the cardboard cup that it is served in. It’s an incredible marketing model that people thought was insane 20 years ago, but Starbucks proved the critics wrong. If the coffee wasn’t so expensive, we would be seeing less coffee shops over the place, so I would estimate that half the cost is a premium on having so many locations across the city. Because the industry is rather profitable, there are a lot of competitors (Blenz, Second Cup, etc.), but none of them ever dare to compete on price, which is something I find very, very interesting. It suggests that coffee consumers aren’t price sensitive.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.