It required three re-readings to find the joke in this piece. Turns out, there isn’t a joke on offer. Though it reads like one of those brilliant gotcha fake-outs—from the likes of MAD or The Onion or National Lampoon or the Borat guy having a little fun, it’s actually the work product of some actual people (putative marketers?) with apparently no sense of humor, proportions or history.
We’re all so ensnared in this age of Nothing’s-Too-Stoooopid that this sort of thing not only passes for actual marketing, but will probably end up enshrined in a “case study” at Harvard or Wharton.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the bottomless cup of coffee is a standard offering in any American diner, Parisian café, any corporate chain sit-down restaurant from your neighborhood IHOP to the recherché reaches of any of the dining rooms at the Sacher Hotel. Works like this: Coffee, please. And then, like magic, every few passes by your table, someone pours another splash of hot coffee into your cup. No app required, no membership, no charts, no graphs, no sciency-math. Just nice hot bottomless coffee. With the possible exception of tap water, coffee is the world’s most ubiquitous “frictionless deliverable.”
The principle is brilliantly illustrated (under “bottomless”) in the Oxford English Dictionary:
“1934 Chicago Tribune 16 Nov. 5/8 (advt.) We've a 10 cent breakfast for you 'til 11:00 in the morning: a gorgeous sugar roll; a bottomless cup of coffee.”
Not that po-mo app-powered AI-infected, Big Data-bedazzled marketing requires a reminder, but The Enlightenment itself was made possible by the very invention of the coffeehouse.
“From their origins in the mid-seventeenth century, the cafes and coffeehouses of Europe created a special social space that contributed to the dissemination of Enlightenment culture,”
( fr. Oxford’s 1,920-page Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. $685.00)
None of this need be said, of course. The joke starts and ends with “For $8.99 a month, subscribers get a free cup of coffee or tea every two hours…”
Every two hours…?
Uh-huh. Well. That solves the pesky problem of someone bothering you at your table with hot coffee every few minutes, doesn’t it?
It required three re-readings to find the joke in this piece. Turns out, there isn’t a joke on offer. Though it reads like one of those brilliant gotcha fake-outs—from the likes of MAD or The Onion or National Lampoon or the Borat guy having a little fun, it’s actually the work product of some actual people (putative marketers?) with apparently no sense of humor, proportions or history.
We’re all so ensnared in this age of Nothing’s-Too-Stoooopid that this sort of thing not only passes for actual marketing, but will probably end up enshrined in a “case study” at Harvard or Wharton.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the bottomless cup of coffee is a standard offering in any American diner, Parisian café, any corporate chain sit-down restaurant from your neighborhood IHOP to the recherché reaches of any of the dining rooms at the Sacher Hotel. Works like this: Coffee, please. And then, like magic, every few passes by your table, someone pours another splash of hot coffee into your cup. No app required, no membership, no charts, no graphs, no sciency-math. Just nice hot bottomless coffee. With the possible exception of tap water, coffee is the world’s most ubiquitous “frictionless deliverable.”
The principle is brilliantly illustrated (under “bottomless”) in the Oxford English Dictionary:
“1934 Chicago Tribune 16 Nov. 5/8 (advt.) We've a 10 cent breakfast for you 'til 11:00 in the morning: a gorgeous sugar roll; a bottomless cup of coffee.”
Not that po-mo app-powered AI-infected, Big Data-bedazzled marketing requires a reminder, but The Enlightenment itself was made possible by the very invention of the coffeehouse.
“From their origins in the mid-seventeenth century, the cafes and coffeehouses of Europe created a special social space that contributed to the dissemination of Enlightenment culture,”
( fr. Oxford’s 1,920-page Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. $685.00)
None of this need be said, of course. The joke starts and ends with “For $8.99 a month, subscribers get a free cup of coffee or tea every two hours…”
Every two hours…?
Uh-huh. Well. That solves the pesky problem of someone bothering you at your table with hot coffee every few minutes, doesn’t it?
☕️ 📈