Coffee, Your Price
[cross-posted at SerandEz]
(Hat tip: Michael B) This is pretty cool, and interesting:
With its blood-red walls and black leather sofas, Kirkland's Terra Bite Lounge looks like any other coffee shop — until you get to the menu. There are no prices listed. Terra Bite doesn't have them.I wonder if - and hope - it will be successful. I think it may be for the reasons illustrated in this comment [the very first comment] on a Kirkland blog:You read that right: No prices. Customers pay what and when they like, or not at all — it makes no difference to the cafe employees, who are instructed not to peek when people put money in the metal lock box.
I went down to Terra Bite randomly on a Sunday with my best friend because Janis had told me about it. Katie and I had this plan to just go in, get coffee and not pay because we wanted to see how it felt to just not pay. We ended up feeling so guilty that we drove back paid double what we would have and I offered to put a bumper sticker on my car to help advertise...it's a crazy mind game they have going there.This is much better than similar ideas from the past - say, communism or other policies that distribute wealth, for a simple reason given by the next comment:
My initial excitement was later tempered by the thought that we've done this before and it has failed miserably (pick any communist state that has tried to force economic equality by spreading wealth). But then I realized that this was fundamentally different. It's not a government forcing us to distribute wealth. It's about relative worth measured by US. It forces US to look at the larger economic picture and assess how we fit in.It's really brilliant, and I'd love to see how it goes. Hopefully it will show that people really are kind, honest, and fair. My guess? A high enough percentage of people really are, and that will make this be at least moderately successful.