January '04

C.L. Bledsoe Luck
David Gianatasio The Movie I Remember
Gary Glauber Physics Lesson
Claudia Smith Liar
Francis Raven My Fifty Dollar Coffee Cup

About a year ago I worked at the St. Louis Bread Company (known nationally as Panera Bread Company), a chain coffee/sandwich shop which is part of the rapidly expanding group of quick-casual restaurants in America . In fact, in four short years Panera’s profits jumped sevenfold to reach $21.7 Million in 2002. This is, as it goes, all fine and well by me, except that when I worked there I made only $6.75 an hour, which pissed me off in the face of their extraordinary profits. It was difficult to endure them congratulating themselves on their outsized profits at their mandatory training camp “Planet Bread” where they use words like "breaducation” to gag you. Their attitude was especially difficult to handle given the fact that quick-casual restaurants trade labor (me) for a standardized pleasurable aesthetic (a Starbucks’ palate) that is quite a lot cheaper than labor.

While working at the Bread Company I discovered a loophole (or a scam, if you will) that was so good I had to quit the stupid job in order squeeze through that loophole. This is because the loophole involved free coffee and as a sweaty employee I received as much coffee as I could guzzle while I was on the clock. So it was pointless to use my con while I was still employed by the Bread Company. My rather trite swindle which made me feel important operated as follows: I bought a medium cup of coffee at the St. Louis Bread Company in October for $1.49 and received a Styrofoam cup enveloped in corporate logos and empty design features. But here’s the key, the nut-graf, of the entire operation: refills are free at the St. Louis Bread Company and you pump them yourself. This means that if you preserve the Styrofoam cup you purchased you can surreptitiously use it later to obtain a free cup of coffee any day of the week (which is especially nice if you no longer have a job to pay for said coffee). And this activity feels very good.

As I have found there are two primary ways of calculating the goodness of this modest bite out of corporate profits. First, you can use the method of division. That is, you can divide the original amount you paid for your coffee by the number of times you have gone in for a free cup and thus derive the amount that each cup costs. This could perhaps be termed “the marginal cost of a cup of coffee.” If you’ve had five cups of coffee using the same cup each cup costs about $.30. This method is satisfying, but only to a point. What I found was that as the number of cups of coffee obtained got larger and larger (and thus the cost of each individual cup got smaller and smaller) this method became less and less satisfying. The difference between a $.30 cup of coffee and a $.25 cup of coffee was just not capable of producing a great deal elation within me. I’m not really sure why this is the case, but it is. This lack of elation might be a personal thing, however, such that if you were to commit to this scam you would find it deeply satisfying, even nourishing. I really don’t have the evidence to say conclusively.

So I moved onto the second method of calculating the goodness (or utility) of stealing cups of coffee, I multiplied. The way this second method works is to multiply the number of cups of coffee you have obtained by the original cost of the coffee, the resulting amount is the amount of money you have made from the St. Louis Bread Company (that is, the amount of their profits that you have eaten away, however modest). And, in a way, it is how much the coffee cup is worth at the time of calculation. For example, if you steal 20 cups of coffee you would have made $1.50 X 20 = $30.00 and your cup would be worth that much.

I would keep track of how many times I had stolen coffee from the Bread Company by using a simple system of pen marks on the bottom of each cup. As the number of marks got larger and higher I felt better and more arrogant about my decision to quit the Bread Company in order to fully commit to my scam. The highest number of marks I ever made on the bottom of any single cup was 33, which meant that the cup was worth $50, but by that point it was pretty nasty and falling apart...