Will mull it over drinks tonight in Silverlake, and post tomorrow :) Thanks for being there! Dude, you were so funny suddenly throwing in the whole local paper thing — after cautioning Anna and I about keeping the message simple! WTF? ;) Nothing against it — Just thought it was hilar –

Glad you made it to your meeting! It was very interesting to meet you, and see you all sweaty and panting — guess it must have been the prospect of all those free samples. (GD&R!)

Seriously, I was far more pleased with the outcome, I guess, than you were; as a former lawyer and amateur politico, I can say that sbx has responded with extreme speed for an international corporation.

Also, getting a commitment to a metric — 90% offer of French pressed at the right price without any effort to delay or redirect, served within five or six minutes — is extraordinary. You will be able to measure this specifically, and could even go back and reanalyse your own data with this in mind. In each month, what percentage of challenges met this criteria? Month by month? Maybe a special category for challenges that met the standard when prompted.

Given, also, what I discovered about sbx training and what we confirmed, this is pretty reasonable. That is, the apparently uniform “stall” or “redirect” we have experience was often an artifact of their customer service training to suggest something that might meet your needs when they thought they couldn’t meet your needs. This artifact could account for half my failures alone.

In addition, the fact that sbx previously differentiated on price as to the METHOD of making the coffee — offering any coffee at a premium if you wanted it pressed over standard brewing, accounts for a few more. At least some of the Baristas think you and I want the coffee cooking method and should ask for it specifally — they truly don’t understand that what you want is the coffee type, whatever it takes to make it.

The rest of my failures can be chalked up to not understanding what Fair Trade is, thinking its a Starbucks blend or Starbucks invented term of art, like their “CAFE” practices, etc. This is clearly a training problem on their part.

So, all in all, I am far less pessimistic over the results you have achieved; not only have you gotten major movement, and clear concessions, you have a commitment to an unambiguous metric. They will either pass or fail, and the blogosphere will be abuzz (not to mention a few print outlets) if sbx fails the terms of its own challenge.

Even better, there will not be any big surprises nine months hence: you can track the metric month by month, and show if challenges are meeting the standard with increasing frequency or not.

As noted, all in all a superb job of moving a major company in the right direction; congratulations!