A Note To Our Customers

Recently a local coffee house manager took matters into his own hands in the never-ending battle between businessmen and layabouts. And he did it in the most spectacularly poetic fashion. 

 A NOTE TO OUR CUSTOMERS 

I WANT TO REMIND YOU THAT AS 

THE NEW MANAGER OF COFFEE 

MATTERS, I WAS HIRED TO INCREASE 

BUSINESS AND TO ENDEVOUR ON MAJOR 

CHANGES TO OUR LOOK, SERVICE AND 

PRODUCT. THEREFORE I WILL PERSONALLY

MONITOR MY CAFE, ESPECIALLY AT NIGHT 

TO DECREASE THE USE OF COFFEE MATTERS 

FOR A STUDY HALL. WE ARE IN BUSINESS TO 

SERVICE CUSTOMERS AND WANT TO ALWAYS 

 OFFER THEM A SEAT TO SIT AND ENJOY OUR 

ATMOSPHERE. WHEN YOU STUDY OR ON THE 

COMPUTER YOU LOOSE TRACK OF TIME. THEN 

 CUSTOMERS COME IN AND THE PLACE LOOKS 

LIKE THE LIBRARY. BOOKS AND COMPUTERS 

SPREAD EVERYWHERE. WE ARE INVESTING DOLLARS 

IN A NEW LOOK AND WE WILL 

NOT ALLOW THIS ABUSE OF MY CAFE GOING FORWARD. 

I APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS, HOWEVER RESPECT ME AS 

A BUSINESS MAN 

THANK YOU                           COFFEE MATTERS MANAGER 

In a polemical free-verse poem vaguely resembling the shape of the most ubiquitous of modern detritus—the discarded paper coffee cup—a modern business man wails against the most ubiquitous post-modern detritus—the loitering university student. It’s a collision of contemporary excess, privilege, and pretense. The coffee house, long a respite for the thirsty of means, the under-employed, the studious, and the literarti—recall a young Hemingway, liver and mind intact, penning The Sun Also Rises in Left Bank Cafés like Le Trou dans la Mur—has come to be synonymous with high-minded loitering as much as with high-priced caffeination. Through a century-long silent, lackadaisical, protest against the universal laws of contemporary industrial fast food commerce, the Bohemian classes have usurped private enterprises and turned them into institutions of work, study, and leisure. Blurring the line between private business and public space.

Yet, the rogue businessman, rebuking the plodding idleness of the upper-ninety-nine percent re-stakes his claim to his domain of influence and commerce. “I WANT TO REMIND YOU,” begins the onslaught of capital letters, grammatical peculiarities, and spell-checked misspellings, A NOTE TO OUR CUSTOMERS, “THAT AS / THE NEW MANAGER OF COFFEE / MATTERS, I WAS HIRED TO INCREASE BUSINESS AND TO ENDEVOUR ON MAJOR / CHANGES.” Major changes indeed. A NOTE is not an emotional plea, but a rant. A rant spurred by anger caused by this new manager being marginalized in his own domain. A rant to reclaim what a long history—littered with barely passed mid-term exams, mediocre unpublished novel manuscripts, and awkward first dates—has taken from he and his kind. From business men.

Commerce, the socialists will cry, is the domain of the greedy, but this businessman is not greedy, he is angry. He has been pushed out by his own customers. His marketplace has been occupied by the very ones upon which he relies. And when they “LOOSE [sic] TRACK OF TIME” the contract between he and they, he cries, is breeched. The Café, his marketplace, is annexed by the layabout coffee drinkers with their books and computers, turned from a place of commerce to a public institution of study, “A STUDY HALL” or “THE LIBRARY.”

“I APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS,” he concludes, almost conciliatory, before crescendoing with his final plea, “HOWEVER, RESPECT ME AS / A BUSINESS MAN // THANK-YOU COFFEE MATTERS MANAGER.” His final act is to forgo his own identity. His unique name, as is given to each of us when we disembark the womb, has been omitted so he might assume the identity of the ur-businessman, of “A BUSINESS MAN.” Underlining the fact that what had appeared at first as a disgruntled retort to the slothful occupants of a private business’ space becomes a manifesto against the tyranny of idle studying, working, and chit-chat devoid of any revenue, on behalf of all businessmen everywhere.