Thanks a Thousand, page 3
Doug tells me it’s been a struggle. No one wanted to manufacture the oddly shaped hole. Everyone told him it couldn’t be done. Finally, Doug and his partner found a company in Canada that helps produce plastic raspberry boxes, which also have weirdly shaped slits.
So they imported the tools from Canada to a factory in Tennessee, where every day buckets of special odor-free plastic pellets are melted down, rolled into sheets, sucked onto molds, peeled off, loaded into boxes, and trucked to stores like Joe Coffee.
And there it is: perfection. Or not. Doug tells me that he’s not finished with revolutionizing lids. “I’m actually working on a new coffee lid now that will be my Mona Lisa,” Doug tells me. The secret is . . . well, I’m not supposed to write about it yet. It’s a cutthroat game, the lid biz.
But this I can tell you: I will not take my coffee lid for granted again. And over the next few days I try to appreciate all the other little hidden masterpieces of industrial design in my life. I’m grateful for the way the on/off switch on my lamp has a smooth indentation for my thumb. I’m grateful for the star-shaped holes in my spaghetti strainer. Small works of genius everywhere.
The Logo
The lid, of course, snaps onto a cardboard cup. I inspect the cup more closely. The surface is colored robin’s-egg blue and adorned with three letters, JOE.
I like the logo. It’s simple and sleek. Since a good logo is crucial to a functioning business, I figure I should thank the designer.
The folks at Joe Coffee give me the phone number of a man named Marke Johnson who lives in Denver.
“Thank you,” I say, when I call him up.
“Well, it’s my job,” he says. “But you’re welcome.”
“Can I ask you how you got the job to design the logo?”
Marke’s answer is more absurdly hipster than I could have dreamed. A few years ago, Marke was in a thirteen-person band called the Cinematic Underground that crisscrossed America in a converted school bus. Marke played guitar but also designed the band’s multimedia slide shows. The band’s trumpet player went on to work at Joe Coffee and eventually recommended Marke for a logo redesign. And voilà.
“Who are your other clients, aside from coffee?” I ask.
“We recently got to rebrand a whiskey,” he says. “And I’ve had tons of meetings with marijuana dispensaries.”
“I’m sensing a theme.”
“Yeah.” He laughs. “A large part of our business comes from branding mind-altering substances and trying to make them socially acceptable.”
When Marke—whose company is called the Made Shop—got the Joe Coffee Company account, he and his team flew to New York to absorb the ambience and liquid. He decided Joe Coffee had a welcoming vibe, and the logo should reflect that.
Thus began endless rounds of meetings and ideas and sketches, some good, some terrible. As with the lid, I’m awed by the amount of anguish that goes into the smallest of decisions.
Consider the choice of typeface. It took days. They wanted something Art Deco, but the usual Art Deco fonts weren’t quite right. “They were too cold and sharp and not friendly enough,” Marke says. They finally stumbled across a font called Nanami whose “corners were rounded just a tiny bit.” I squint at the letter E on my cup and notice that, yes, the corners look like they’ve been sandpapered.
Another challenge: The executives at Joe Coffee wanted the logo to somehow contain an image of a coffee cup, but Marke was skeptical. A coffee cup seemed too clichéd. He’d been hoping to get away from Joe Coffee’s previous logo, which had a silhouette of one of those big old nineties mugs. “It looked like something Rachel from Friends would drink from,” Marke says.
But Marke and his team hit upon the idea of changing the perspective. What if the image of a cup was seen from a bird’s-eye view, nestled inside the letter O?
There’s a whole genre of secret images in logos—the famous arrow lurking in the FedEx logo, the bear hidden in the Toblerone logo. “Our coffee cup isn’t as hidden as those. But the hope is that it’ll take a moment to notice it. That it will give you just a little bit of a surprise.”
As I’m talking to Marke on the phone, I look around my office. I see logos all over—the red swish of my Purell bottle, the cheery yellow lettering of my Pepto-Bismol. This is my scenery, my landscape.
“There are logos everywhere, even when I go camping I can’t escape logos,” Marke says. “A lot of designs are good but a lot are terrible. I know a musician who has an extreme problem with background music in malls. For me, logos are analogous to that. It’s frustrating. There’s a Walgreens near my house, and they have a poster advertising three items. And there’s noticeably more space between two of the items. Every time I see it, I get furious.”
I laugh. I can’t imagine getting outraged by a slightly lopsided poster. I tell Marke that maybe he needs to sip some rebranded whiskey or to smoke some legally purchased pot.
And yet I’m glad Marke has that infatuation, because these logos are what I see every day. I’m grateful that he’s committed to making our world just a little more elegant. And Marke has given Joe customers a nice logo: clean, friendly, less baffling than the Starbucks green mermaid wearing a crown.
Who knows? Maybe his logo even helped me enjoy my coffee more. In researching coffee, I’ve run across several experiments showing that external factors affect people’s judgment of a coffee’s taste. When the same coffee is served in a fancier cup, people think it tastes better. We are an easily manipulated species.
I thank Marke again and promise to be more appreciative of all the folks trying to make the world less ugly.
The Sleeve
I’m making cold calls to thank people for my cup and getting mixed reactions. The guy who answered the phone at a tree farmer association, whose members grow the wood used in my paper cup, responded with the same tone I use when I’m asked to take an E-Meter reading on the street.
“I know this sounds odd, but I want to thank you . . . ,” I started.
“I’m good,” he said.
“No, I’m not trying to sell . . .”
He’d already clicked off.
But many others were more receptive, like the woman who helped create the coffee cup sleeve, the brown cardboard ring you slip onto your coffee cup to protect you from the heat.
Again, I’d never devoted much time to thinking about the sleeve, but it’s really a remarkable little invention. Consider the millions, perhaps billions, of fingers and thumbs these cardboard sleeves have saved from burning, or at least from mildly annoying pain.
A little research revealed that coffee cup sleeves have been around since ancient times. They even have a name: zarfs. Turkish coffee and Chinese tea were served to nobles in zarfs made from gold, silver, tortoiseshell, and other materials.
The modern cardboard version, though, was born in 1992 in Portland and is called the Java Jacket. Java Jacket Inc. is still around and remains a family-owned business run by Jay Sorensen and his wife, Colleen. I find the phone number and Colleen answers.
“Thank you. You’ve saved my fingertips so many hours of unpleasantness,” I say.
“That’s nice to hear,” she says.
I ask Colleen to tell me the origin of the Java Jacket. It’s a delightfully simple tale, as clear as the falling apple that supposedly inspired Isaac Newton. One day, Colleen’s husband, Jay, got in his car to buy lunch to bring their daughter at school. He pulled up to the drive-through. He took the cup from the kid at the window—and felt his fingers start to singe. He reflexively let go. The coffee spilled in his lap, and he presumably said some words that I won’t print here.
Jay went home and started brainstorming ideas with Colleen around their kitchen table, trying to figure out how to prevent this from happening again.
It was a particularly dark time in their lives, says Colleen. “We were just getting by.” Jay had opened a Shell gas station with his dad, but it had recently closed. Colleen was doing odd catering jobs, and while she liked the “nice people and free food,” it was barely making ends meet.
“We borrowed $10,000 from Jay’s folks, made some prototypes, and sold them out of the back of our car,” Colleen says. A few months later, they drove to a coffee convention, where the Java Jacket was a hit with café owners. “We collected all these names and addresses and sent off four thousand samples.”
Within a couple of years, they were a profitable business and able to hire several employees. “It was like the American dream come true,” Colleen says. She quit being a cater-waiter and now spends her time on Java Jacket and working with a charity that delivers leftover restaurant food to the homeless.
When I hear their story, I’m once again thrilled. It’s almost Capra-esque. I’m grateful tales like Colleen’s still exist. I’m grateful there’s still room in America for families—and not just the R&D departments of Fortune 500 companies—to come up with a goofy but surprisingly useful idea and then turn it into a reality that makes millions of lives just an eensy bit better.
“It’s been a wild ride,” Colleen says. She tells me about the time she was watching TV and saw a car commercial and, to her surprise, the driver was using a Java Jacket. It was their first national exposure. “You know that feeling you get when you have a crush on someone, that little giddy feeling? That’s what I felt.”
A few years later, the Java Jacket got an even bigger honor. It was featured in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit called “Humble Masterpieces,” where it was displayed alongside an aspirin tablet and LEGO bricks. Colleen calls the experience surreal. “I remember going to New York and it was kind of overwhelming,” says Colleen. “I went to MoMA—the actual MoMA!—and there was our Java Jacket in a glass case. I remember I didn’t stay in the room long, because I wanted to see the Picassos and Monets.”
Before I hang up, I ask Colleen to be honest. “Are you grateful I called, or was it more of a pain in your neck?”
“No, I’m happy you called. It reminded me how lucky I am. I really feel I won the lottery. I mean, I wouldn’t want everyone who uses the Java Jacket to call, since I might not get any work done. But I’m happy you called.”
This is a relief. When it’s effective, gratitude should be a two-way street. It should be helpful to both the thanker and the thankee. It’s not just a self-help tool, it should brighten other lives. I’m sure there are Greta Garbos out there who just want to be left alone and unthanked. I have to be careful. But luckily Colleen isn’t one of them.
• • •
The next day I’m feeling something besides gratitude. I’m feeling overwhelmed.
I’ve spent several days researching and thanking those involved in coffee cups, and I haven’t even gotten to the makers of the cup itself.
When I ponder the number of gratitude recipients involved, I start to get dizzy. There are the folks at the paper factory where the cardboard is made. The lumberjacks who cut down the trees for the wood pulp to make the cardboard. The metalworkers who manufacture the chainsaws the lumberjacks use. The miners who dig up the iron that is turned into the steel for the chainsaws.
It’s like a particularly vicious series of pop-up ads. Every time I identify another step, I’m confronted with hundreds of divergent paths. I could write a thousand books, depending on what corridors I venture down.
I remind myself: Don’t forget the folks who make the hardhats that the miners wear when getting the iron that’s turned into steel to make the chainsaws the lumberjacks use to cut down the trees to get the wood pulp to make the cup that my coffee comes in.
Deep breath.
In Paleolithic times, my project would have been much easier. But with globalization—which I do think is a force for good, despite its many pitfalls—thanking everyone involved in my cup of coffee could be a lifetime job.
Over dinner with Julie and the kids, I tell them I’m feeling snowed under. “I seriously think I might have to thank every single human on earth,” I say.
Julie looks skeptical. She points to the People magazine lying nearby on the radiator.
“What about her? How did Beyoncé help make your coffee?”
I pause for a minute, and then I come up with an answer. With enough research, I explain, I could probably get to Beyoncé. Maybe one of the engineers who made the plastic lining for my coffee cup listened to Beyoncé songs to motivate her while studying for her chemistry final. Maybe the guy who drove the warehouse truck blasted Beyoncé to stay alert.
“That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think?” Julie says.
“Yes and no,” I say. We are all so interconnected; it’s hard to know where to draw the line.
“What about us?” Lucas asks. “How did we help?”
After a minute, I come up with this response: Julie and I have to work to support Lucas and his brothers. And our taxes pay for the roads that the coffee is delivered on and the cops who keep Joe Coffee from being robbed.
“So, thank you,” I say.
I’m sensing I might have a convert in Zane. He points out it’s not just people living now who helped.
“Also, what about the parents of the woman at the coffee store?” he says. “And their parents. And their parents. And their parents.”
“Right,” I say, glad to have a bit of support. “It’s millions of dead people too, like the guy who first forged steel, and the goatherd in ancient Ethiopia who noticed his goats started dancing after eating a particular plant, and decided to try the coffee beans himself. At least that’s the legend.”
If I believed in séances, I’d have to thank them too.
After dinner, on reflection, I have to admit Julie’s right. Thanking Beyoncé is just too far afield. I need to limit myself. Maybe I’ll just try to thank a thousand people. That can be my goal. Thanks a thousand. It’s huge, but manageable.
3
The Roasters
Thanks for Taking the Heat
A few days later, as Julie gets ready for her morning walk, I look her in the eyes, and say, “I just want to let you know that I am deeply grateful that you took Lucas to the orthodontist yesterday.”
“Okaaaay,” she says, pulling on her boots. “You’re deeply welcome, I guess.”
Point taken. The phrase “deeply grateful” is a tad formal, bordering on unsettling. I sound like a member of an Oregon cult who practices nude meditation.
But I have a reason. I recently read a Wharton study that concluded that people who say the phrase “I am grateful” are seen as more genuinely thankful than when people simply say “thank you.”
So I’ve been test-driving the “I am grateful” construction and throwing in the occasional “deeply” for emphasis.
The gist of the study is that the phrase “thank you” is too often seen as robotic, a mere verbal reflex. If you switch it up with other gratitude phrases, maybe it will jolt people awake, cause them to take notice.
So far, the responses have been varied—a lot of genuine smiles, several nervous ones. This morning I told the barista at Joe, “I’m really grateful for this coffee.”
“As well you should be,” he said, laughing. His confidence brightened my day.
Oddly, the biggest impact of using this phrase might be on my own psyche. When I force myself to utter the awkward phrase “I am grateful,” I actually start to feel a bit more grateful.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It confirms a huge theme I’ve noticed in my previous writing projects: That the exterior shapes the interior. That our speech and actions change our thoughts. There’s a great quote from the man who founded Habitat for Humanity that describes this phenomenon. He said: “It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
Let me give you a quick example. A few years ago, I wrote a book in which I decided to give myself a crash course in religion. I tried to learn about the Bible by living it, by following all the biblical rules as literally as possible. I attempted to abide by the Ten Commandments. I grew a bushy Moses-like beard. I avoided wearing clothes made of mixed fibers (as instructed by Leviticus).
I also had to try to become more compassionate, which is not my natural state. How could I make this happen? My strategy was to force myself to act as if I were compassionate.
At the time I had a friend in the hospital. I hate hospitals. I hate everything about them, including the smell, which manages to be simultaneously antiseptic and putrid. But I said to myself, “What would a compassionate person do? He or she would visit the friend in the hospital.” And so I forced myself to go.
When I got to the hospital, a strange thing happened. I tricked my brain. My brain said, “Look, I’m in the hospital visiting my friend. I must be a compassionate person!” If you do this often enough, you become a bit more compassionate for real. It’s basic cognitive behavioral therapy: Behave in a certain way, and your mind will eventually catch up to your actions.
The same fake-it-till-you-make-it phenomenon happened when I wrote an article about trying to be the best husband I could be. Every day, I forced myself to buy a little gift for Julie—marzipan, magnets, overpriced soap that smelled of guava.
Once again, I outsmarted my brain. My brain thought: “I’m buying my wife these trinkets, I must really love her.” And my love got a little stronger.
I’m seeing a similar shift with gratitude. I’m expressing gratitude out loud enough times that my mind is catching up. I’m still far from my goal to be annoyed less than half the time, but it’s a start.
Later that morning, I head off to Brooklyn to say “I’m grateful” to some folks there. Ed Kaufmann has invited me to the Joe Coffee roastery. This is the place where the raw green coffee beans are shipped from around the world, cooked dark brown, and put into vans to deliver to the cafés.
The facility is a cavernous space with brick walls, wood beams, forklifts, cardboard boxes, and an incongruous golden chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
