My weekends are split between two local coffee shops in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The first (also my first coffee love of BK) is Oslo, an amazing cozy but roomy establishment (roomy by NY standards) that offers an assortment of coffee delights. They are friendly, treat each order like its the only one of the day, and offer several different roast for purchase by the pound, all fairtrade certified. The second, and closer option is Gimme! Coffee, which offers a bit more variety, if you like fancy, sugar-filled drinks (alright, sometimes I do as well) and also offers many a fairtrade option – this is a good time to remind the reader that to be certified as fairtrade the grower/producer must adhere to strict social AND environmental standards.
Now, Gimme! Coffee has fantastic brews, and is much closer, yet I will always go to Oslo if time permits. Why do you ask? Very simple reason. Oslo has Gimme! beat on the douche bag to square foot ratio (DB:foot^2).
If you find yourself at Oslo coffee at 1 PM on a random weekday (as I have before), the activity level is slightly less than weekend. Writers clunk away on their MacBooks, mothers with strollers push their children in for their much-deserved afternoon break, pleasant baristas greet you and probably remember your order if you are a daytime regular.
Let’s have a look at Gimme! around the same time on that same day. Although equally filled with sticker covered MacBooks, the scribes turn out to be self-important bloggers (awkward whistle from me) who do not pay their bills with well-crafted diatribes, but rather with their bond trader father’s good will. Walk over to the condiment bar and you find a 10-minute wait to put a lid on your latte as two impassioned hipsters are in a to-the-death battle about whether or not Kafka’s work can even be relevant to a debate on the impersonality and bureaucracy of an industrialized world considering his true wishes were for all of his manuscripts to be destroyed following his death. A mother brings in her 4-year-old and orders a Grasshopper and a decaf latte for the child. When the caring barista reminds her that decaf still retains a small amount of caffeine and therefore may not suitable for a child of her age the mother explains that her daughter, Metalica (NOT named after the band, the band has two L’s, thank you) picks her own bedtime as her parents do not burden her with the constraints of a time limit on when her day should end just because society believes a child should be in bed early, so she is not phased by the caffeine warning.
Back to Oslo. The barista chats with a patron about the latest Idiotarod and some his favorite costumes, which prompts another patron to ask her friend if she has decided on her Lebowskifest costume yet. The peace is interrupted by a loud customer who walks up to the bar, Final Cut enabled MacBook Pro in hand, mumbles an order through his greasy locks, and then goes back to his iPhone “No, I won’t cut a second, 158 minutes is not that long and if people don’t want to sit through then fuck ‘em, they won’t get it anyway.” While he waits for his milk to froth, he angrily dials another number on his iPhone and begins to bitch at his mother about how worthless his NYU film education is and demands $10,000 to finish editing his film as compensation for wasting his time by making him attain a worthless piece of paper for her to hang on her wall. “None of the true visionaries mother’s made them get degrees,” he argues. The annoyed patrons around him take a few steps away. AND THERE IT IS. Space to move. The DB:foot^2 ration is low enough that the annoyed drinker and can move away from said douche bag, which is not always a luxury available at Gimme! And for this simple luxury, I have walked the extra blocks, to Oslo. So, while both shops offer great tasting, fairtrade beverages, Oslo has the upper hand in winning the DB:foot^2 ratio.
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