Coffee Shops

I am one of those folks who hang out different places drinking coffee, and I've been doing it since I was about two years old (yes, you read it correctly). Back then, when my mother would take me with her to the apartment section down and across from ours to daily visit her friend Betty, we’d all sit together in Betty's kitchen and have a cup of coffee. Only then I called it my “cossee”, which my mother later told me was mostly milk and sugar with a little “cossee” thrown in. But back then I thought I was hobnobbing with the big shots on their level! And as the years passed, I retained my affection for coffee, which I mainly drank at home in the form of a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee dumped in a cup of hot boiling water with a little sugar and milk thrown in for good measure. It’s amazing to me, even now, how cheap coffee is to make and drink at home, while people will go out and dump a wad of dough to drink essentially the same product at a place like Starbucks. The only problem with that amazement is that I’m one of the fools who do that! Why?

I can’t speak for other people as to why they go out and spend a lot of money to drink in a coffee shop, other than it’s obviously a good, informal setting for friends or associates to get together in public. I mainly go out to coffee shops by myself (although sometimes I’ll take my wife and/or children as well). My reasons are personal: I am by nature a reclusive soul who has no problem with solitude and a great problem with the public. Not that I dislike the public per se: I usually just dislike being IN it. And because of that, I discovered many, many years ago that if I sat out in a public place (such as a coffee shop) to read, study, or just think, than I could much more easily rivet my thoughts on the task at hand (and away from the annoying surrounding environment). Fortunately, though, I’ve been able in recent years (with conscious effort) to transfer some that mental focus to when I’m at home (like right now!). But I habitually still like to go out (sounds a bit paradoxical, doesn’t it?). And nowadays I have many more choices than ever of places to go.

Starbucks is the biggest coffee shop company around in Gainesville, with several places to go, spread all over town. I generally go there, not because their coffee is the best (in my opinion, it isn’t), but because this corporation understands that its customers count and that it’s important not to keep them waiting endlessly in line for their orders. If someone ahead of me in line has a large order, then while that’s being taken care of, someone else will get my order going. In other places, like Books-a-Million or one of those mom-and-pop locally owned shops, one customer could hold up the line for several minutes with one person behind the counter who has to see each order from beginning to completion before going on to the next one. That’s why I switched to Starbucks. I still go to the other places sometimes, because I like their flavored coffees (especially Books-a-Million’s Streusel Cake coffee and the many different delicious flavors at Corner Cup, a locally-owned Gainesville coffee shop). Border’s bookstore has a good coffee café section, with usually at least two people working behind the counter (and good coffee, too), but it’s inconveniently located for me. Other places I usually avoid because of the “one person behind the counter” policy that they have. I’ll probably never stop going out for coffee, but I have become more comfortable at home with my “thinking”, so who knows, I may someday even start boiling water again and make instant “cossee”!