State of Confusion
The Observer has a little blurb about the closing of American Spoon on Liberty. The owners had done their research before opening; they knew that A2 consumers accounted for a large share of the chain’s sales. But there was one detail they overlooked: Ann Arborites are only interested in shopping there when they’re on vacation in Petoskey. “People just want to buy it up north,” one of the owners told the Observer. There’s still so much we’ll never understand about this state.
Perhaps it’s a bit like Krispy Kreme donuts or Coors beer. When you could only get Krispy Kreme down south, every northerner would eat a dozen every time he went south, but it didn’t follow that every northerner would eat a dozen every time he went to Kroger, just because they were there. Doesn’t mean they aren’t good donuts, it’s just that with the novelty gone, the urgency to eat them goes away as well. Krispy Kreme gets over extended, Krispy Kreme probably ends up bankrupt.
Coors beer is similar, but different. When you could only get it in the west, people in the east would stock up when they were out there. “Rocky Mountain springwater, dude, you can’t get that shit everywhere!” But once you could get that shit everywhere, folks realized that that shit was really shitty. The difference between Coors and Krispy Kreme is that Coors is still fucking beer, so people will still drink it. Coors is a successful company. They just merged with (bought) Molson.
The lesson? Better to make rotten beer than fantastic donuts. And I’m guessing jelly is more like donuts than beer.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on October 5th, 2005 at 3:53 pmI don’t remember if there was anything for which to boycott Coors, but now I can’t bring myself to buy Molson’s based on owner taste alone. Blecch.
I still can’t believe Zingerman’s markets Zapp’s potato chips as a “gourmet” item. Back in Louisiana, that’s what we ate when we weren’t up to Doritos.
posted by Lazaro on October 5th, 2005 at 4:24 pmWell there you go. Having only eaten Zapp’s from Zingerman’s, I think they’ra fantastic. Maybe in Grammercy, LA folks eat Uncle Ray’s when they’re in the mood for something fancy.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on October 5th, 2005 at 4:51 pmDo they have Crawtater?
posted by Dave on October 5th, 2005 at 5:32 pmyes. and american spoon products as well.
posted by ellen on October 6th, 2005 at 12:37 amAmerican Spoon researchers are idiots. They looked at the their A2 address clientele & totally dismissed the basic three-rule premise of all commercial real estate — location, location & location.
posted by E. Michael on October 6th, 2005 at 11:09 amThey place an overpriced jelly store on Liberty, in the heart of A2’s student district?
Yeah, after wolfing down $2 hot dogs at the corner of Liberty & maynard, students are going to walk across the street and drop $5 for four ounces of apricot preserves.
Not.
If American Spoon would have poined up the extra rent & opened their store on Detroit Street/in Kerrytown, they would have been among their boutique food kin & would have flourished.
The American Spoon owner blaming where A2-ites buy his product is a dope.
E. Michael, that’s just what I was thinking. The folks that vacation in Petoskey aren’t the ones walking down Liberty Street every day.
Although I think it also has something to do with occasional novelty purchases, too. For example, I like Blenheim Ginger Ale. They have Blenheim Ginger Ale at Zingerman’s. When I am at Zingerman’s, I sometimes buy a Blenheim Ginger Ale (for $2!). However, if Blenheim Ginger Ale were available everywhere, I don’t think I would purchase it with any greater frequency. So, if the Ann Arborites that buy from American Spoon in Petoskey make the same purchases in the downtown Ann Arbor store, would American Spoon survive? Probably not.
When American Spoon opened, my immediate verdict was, “A downtown store that sells jam? I give it one month.” They outlasted by prediction by quite some time. Maybe it was the gelato.
posted by Chris on October 6th, 2005 at 1:25 pmThe reason to boycott Coors is because they support folks like James Dobson and are hugely arch-conservative. Oh, and Cheney’s daughter used to work there. (I always get a kick out of how the Coors company lobbies to undermine gay rights, especially in Colorado, but the Aut Bar still serves Coors products…)
posted by js on October 6th, 2005 at 4:11 pmThe reason to boycott Coors is because it’s bad beer…
posted by Kozzie on October 6th, 2005 at 7:27 pmCoors provides full health benefits to same-sex domestic partners of its employees, while simultaneously attempting to undermine everyone’s rights, not just those of homosexuals.
And Rocky Mountain springwater is radioactive from all of the uranium-mine tailings. Run a geiger counter over your next Colorado cold one, and see what happens.
posted by Adolph Coors on October 7th, 2005 at 1:18 amNO MORE GELATO?!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
posted by Real Big on October 7th, 2005 at 9:14 pmWill miss that spearmint gelato, though.
posted by Sam on October 9th, 2005 at 12:16 amCoors (the company) has seperated themselves from the Coors family that used to own them. All the money that comes from the coors family that goes into ultra-conservative causes comes from the family, not the corporation. The company is very active in promoting a very gay-friendly atmosphere for their employees, including being on of the first companies that offered same sex benefits.
There story is more complicated then that, but there was a great article written by one of the co-owners of the Aut Bar that explained things very well, it was in the old Agenda rag that used to be publicshed (i think thats what is was called, published by some UM prof).
Whos got the geiger counter to put the uranium mine conspiracy to the test??
posted by Just a Voice on October 10th, 2005 at 1:46 pmCoors is one of those Colorado enigmas.
Back in the times that PSD referred to were the halcyon days for the Coors Family. In the 70’s and 80’s, they only distributed their beer to the west of Colorado. Their post-tax margins were in the order of 43%.
The older Coors brothers were actually engineers, and honest to god brewers (unlike today’s Busch b.s. artist). They have developed many ceramic products, and if you have a mortar and pestle in your lab, or any number of ceramic products, there’s a good chance it came from the Coors Ceramic plant that still operates in Golden.
They also introduced the aluminum beer can to the marketplace (working with alcoa, if my memory is correct), together with the concept of recycling centers sitting outside of grocery stores. Coors was quite innovative in conserving energy and reducing wastewater in those days. Without boring you with the details too much, in the 70’s, before the energy crisis, a typical Amercian brewery would send 30 bottles of water to the sewer for each and every bottle that they produced. Coors was operating at half of that amount of waste. (FYI, Leopold Bros. only sewers 2 bottles for every 1 bottle produced).
There are a few reasons that Coors has been boycotted over the years. Growing up in Colorado, my friends and I boycotted Coors because we knew that Joe Coors bankrolled the Heritage Foundation, America’s first conservative “checkbook”, for candidates on the Right. Joe Coors (or more specifically, J. Coors’ money) is viewed by many to be the THE reason the Reagan was elected.
Other reasons that they were boycotted were for union busting (they busted Unions by offering more money and benefits than the Unions did.) as well as sexist, homophobic, and racist hiring proceedures. Joe Coors himself made some pretty seriously offensive/racist comments over the years.
Another strange quirk is that Joe Coors was so paranoid of drugs (remember, he was a close, personal friend of Reagan), that he hired a detective agency to find out if his employees were doing Coke outside of work. Eventually, this turned into a weird “sting” (that could never be linked to Coors) where one of the p. detectives bought large quantities of coke and tried to sell it to some employees. What eventually happened is that this coke was eventually distibuted in the area…..so if you did coke in the mid-80’s in the Golden/Littleton/Boulder area, there’s a good chance that Joe Coors was the original buyer!
This all changed when some idiot decided to go public with Coors, eventually handing over the reins to a bunch of former Doritos executives. Profits now sit at between 2 and 4 percent, and both Coors and Molson are getting slowly suffocated by Bud in a shrinking North American beer market. You can tell when the Doritos guys showed up because Coors ads switched from Mark Harmon enjoying a Coors in the middle of the mountains to boobs, boobs, and more boobs.
As JAV mentioned, the good news with the new Coors, is that they have completely moved away from the anti-anyone-who-isn’t-a-white-male hiring practices.
posted by todd on October 12th, 2005 at 2:13 pmWow, that was really interesting. It’s not my kind of beer, but I have to say that it’s hard to get too upset over union busting when they’re busting-by-being-better.
posted by Anna on October 12th, 2005 at 3:08 pmWell……I have to say that I didn’t know anyone who worked at Coors in the 80’s who didn’t say what a great company it was to work for.
The only (yeah, I know, a biggy) problem is that they weren’t treating EVERYONE well…….ie women, minorities. It has since then corrected these problems, and now you’d be pretty hard pressed to say anything but good things about them, employment-wise……..
posted by todd on October 12th, 2005 at 3:31 pmThanks for the history lesson, Todd. I have a few vague memories of the outdoorsy Coors commercials (although as a kid my favorite beer commercials were the animated bear of Hamm’s Beer).
So was the beer in fact better, back in the 70’s and 80’s, before the Dorito guys and the boobs and Kid Rock? And how does Burt Reynolds figure in to all of this?
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on October 12th, 2005 at 4:23 pmAn older friend of mine had some buddies who worked for Stroh’s in Detroit in the 70s. It was company policy in those days that employees could drink as much Stroh’s as they might like all day long while at work, and have heard that on their birthdays, they were allowed to go swimming in the beer vat, naked.
(This may not have been official company policy)
posted by OFWinsurgent on October 12th, 2005 at 5:39 pmofw, did you know that “gullible” is actually a made-up word, not in any dictionary?
posted by peter honeyman on October 13th, 2005 at 8:04 amWell, all beer formulas change over the years. Whenever you hear a commercial that says something like “we’ve used the same recipe since 1888″, you know they’re full of crap. Malting has completely changed, the equipment used has completely changed. The science of brewing has changed.
I will say that Coors “Winterfest” that is produced every year in their smaller brewhouse is quite good, and for a time was an all malt beer.
So yes, the beer has changed, but I honestly don’t know how much the recipes have changed over the years. There were only two Coors employees in my class at American brewing school I graduated from in 95. One was their chief taster (wow….what a palate this guy had! And no, I’m not kidding), and the other, a woman, was being groomed to be the head of packaging. Neither of them would ever talk about brewing recipes, for obvious reasons.
One thing that I do know is that after they went public, Coors started shipping beer to their new plant in Tennessee for packaging in large tanker trucks, and this would obviously change the character of the beer no matter how careful they were with things. They did this for two reasons. First, they could still claim that it was brewed in the Rockies, and second, the Golden plant is build right up against the mountains. The packaging (bottling/canning) hall is on the wrong end of their lot, and they can no longer expand their packaging production…..or at least not without a heck of a lot of dynamite.
On another note, related to Stroh’s, one of my other classmates at school in Chicago was Gary Stroh IV. He was just a year older than I was, and he was a really nice guy. He was a lit major at Reed, I think….what I remember for certain is that it was one of those schools without grades. He was being groomed to come aboard the company, obviously, and when he graduated, they shipped him off to Africa to work at South African Breweries. SAB now owns Miller, Pabst, and a number of other breweries around the world.
Oh, and as to the drinking on site…….Coors used to allow people to drink all that they wanted in their hospitality room after work. This practice stopped in the 80’s when people started to understand the concept of DUI……
After I finished my graduate work in brewing in Germany, I apprenticed in a smaller brewery that had breakfast at 5.00 am before the shift start. The breakfast consisted of a soft-boiled egg, some meat, some cheese, and a half-liter of hefeweizen! This doesn’t happen in Germany’s larger breweries, I can assure you……but it is available for lunch!
posted by todd on October 13th, 2005 at 9:35 amI remember taking school field trips to Stroh’s in the 70s and they said the workers could drink beer at work (again, this is pre-DUImania, Peter).
As for the swimming naked in the beer vats, I think this was an after-hours activity
posted by OFWinsurgent on October 13th, 2005 at 5:59 pmGetting back to an earlier comment about why the American Spoon failed….
It is getting to be like all cities are the same. They all have the same chain restaurants, same chain stores, same same same. I agree - we used to like to have certain things in certain places because that was the only place you could get them.
I was in the UP last week. We had pasties up the ass. There is a pasty shop a few blocks down the road from where I work in Livonia. I NEVER go there.
You see McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Krispy Kreme, Applebees, etc.. etc… etc… in every place you go. You see Target, KMart, Walmart, etc…etc…etc.. in every place you go. Yes there is the one off here and there, but really why travel when everything is essentially the same everywhere????
posted by trojanhorse on October 18th, 2005 at 10:36 pmyou have put your finger on the principle reason i lost interest in traveling in the usa. and, to be honest, much of europe is mcdonaldsland, too, at this point. (but i go anyway — whee! ciao!)
posted by peter honeyman on October 18th, 2005 at 11:12 pmTrojanhorse, you can start doing your part to erradicate mall spawn by never shopping/”dining” (ugh) at any of the places you have mentioned above.
Even among the strip malls full of cloned shit, there are independent places. I used to be a teacher in Westland and found a few owner-operated places to go even around there.
posted by OFWinsurgent on October 19th, 2005 at 12:22 amTH and Peter — Your comments demonstrate that you need to get out of the midwest in general, and Michigan, in particular, more often.
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