Thanks for stopping by, and I very much enjoyed your post as well. Thanks for the link, and I look forward to reading more of your stuff!

Thanks so much for stopping by and commenting. I appreciate what you are doing, and I appreciate your willingness to communicate with others about what you do and why you do it.

Lainie

I will say that I seriously almost fell out of my chair when you mentioned Alice Waters (one of our heroes) in the same blog entry as our coffeebar. Wow! I’m floored!

Thanks again!
Nick

I don’t support snobbery for the sake of snobbery: For example, I can’t abide shops that only sell very expensive products when less-expensive products of equal (or superior) quality are quite available. (Wine shops can be guilty of this.)

But when there is a very simple principle of quality involved (i.e. pouring espresso over ice makes it sour), then I think that a good businessman/woman is quite right to draw the line and preserve the integrity of his/her product.

Again, thanks for your comment.

I too thought of the Burger King commercials of the 1970s. But I also thought of Primo and Secondo, the two brothers in the great movie, “The Big Night”, which explored the frustrations of a business walking the line between running a profitable business that catered heavily to public tastes and trying to keep a cohesive vision and set of standards to elevate what consumers considered “good taste”.

It seems that there are many good businesses that cater to a customer always being right. But its those businesses that challenge the status quo that have the real opportunity for being truly great and also making their customers better off for it. They may not always be profitable in the short run. But should they survive at their mission, their long-term effects can be enormous.