Community

Tonight I ran into two people I know, both at Whole Foods. One of the guys I ran into tonight needs a couple of wheels rebuilt. Yeah, we'd be happy to do that. Our mechanic really enjoys wheel work.

The other day, I had an odd interaction with a gentleman standing in line at the post office. He is selling his Merlin to make room for a new Seven. He was excited to tell me the news. We'd spoken just a week or two prior about his aspirations of getting a new bike.

On my way home, I was thinking about how small-town it feels to have these sorts of conversations in a place outside of the RSC. But this isn't that small of a town and we're living in modern USA, everyone is busy doing things and involved in professional work lives.

The RSC also isn't a small-town sort of place. It's modern in appearance, style and feel. It's a professional space. It hosts business meetings, investor-investee interviews, interesting conversations, people and ideas. This person teaches chemistry at Harvard, that one over there is working on curing cancer. I've been told that match.com dates happen here too, it is a coffee shop after all. But there's not a lot of anonymity here, so that seems to keep shenanigans to a minimum, or so I like to believe.

Saturday night one of our good customers celebrated his 40th birthday at the Studio. His friends and family were together to share his special day with him. I got to partake in the festivities as barista and as a friend. We've now been host to a 30th surprise b-day party (007 style) and a 50th birthday celebration. Landmark days are being captured here.

So when someone says "Buy Local," I suppose that means come to our shop to buy stuff. But I don't relate RSC with this, I think this campaign is more applicable to food where it is important to the consumer to get the freshest food by buying local.

Where it comes to the Studio, I think of it like this: we'd better offer the best experience, best customer service, the best products and best value than anyone anywhere. I don't want someone coming in because they have listened to some Buy Local campaign, I want each person to see the value that lies within its walls. That we are an integral part of the community, building community and a place where employees have a lot of interaction with each person as an individual should only add to the value proposition.

We don't have fancy methods of routing a phone call and we don't have a PA message overhead when it's time to close telling people to leave. We have technology where it belongs and in these other places, I think it's quite alright that we aren't keeping pace with the rest of the world.