One of the proudest changes I’ve affected so far at the bar has been some light downsizing. Before I came on to the staff of the Joebella bar, they had already been displaying and selling an 8 oz cup for all drinks. Unfortunately, it sat adjacent to 12, 16, and 20 oz varieties as well. 

We’ve now fixed that.

I’d taken away the 20 oz size before, albeit in environments with clientele different from that found in the North County. I was a little apprehensive in this case. Typically, when we speak well of Starbucks and the like, we focus any concessionary praise on their role in introducing new (typically rural, perhaps) populations to specialty coffee and espresso beverages. Never before, however, have I served in a place where chain coffee was really the only option for reasonably tolerable drinks, and thus, not only familiar to a majority of customers but dogma!

And not least among the precedents that such places set, cup sizing has been taken as a given. What other three sizes would one offer other than 12, 16, 20 oz? And in a location where no small percentage of drip coffee drinkers take the largest, hugest, biggest, most immense “cuppa java” (really, I wouldn’t have believed the number of tired colloquialisms I’m hearing now for coffee), the elimination* of what’s seen in these crowds already as “kinda small” could have caused some delicate explanative wording at the point of sale.

So with perhaps more trepidation than in the past, I preemptively attempted to address any issues the staff could have encountered while making the change: double-checking any orders from regulars for “large” drinks, etc. I changed the menu board and the display cups, adding price tiers and examples for the 8 oz size and dropping those of the 20.

Now in our third week under these changes, things have gone off exactly as I’d hoped. Sales of the “new” size have gone up tremendously, and those of the outgoing have inversely declined. Not only does this arrangement solve the issues I was trying to tackle (namely: slow speed of service during rushes for production of 20 oz milk drinks, plus the difficulty of setting a price point that covers the enormous cost of 16-18 oz dairy), but demonstrates my belief that customer education can really surmount discrepancies that we encounter in trying to indoctrinate a finite clientele into specialty coffee.

So I’ve come out of this first experiment encouraged that, whatever I had assumed about the state of specialty coffee in the North County, what we’re doing really does just taste better. And when we suggest something, whether a smaller size milk drink that makes tremendous coffee shine, or taking five minutes to enjoy your drink sitting down (at a table, with a real damn cup), people do notice, and they try it, and they know you know what you’re talking about, and they agree!

 

*Next couple weeks, they’ll still be available by polite, special request. Once we run out of cups, though, that’s it!