I love a good cup of coffee. I recently tried a very simple diet where the only fluid you are allowed to drink is water. No alcohol, no coffee. I lasted almost 48 hours before the caffeine withdrawal kicked in.
At home, we have a Nespresso machine. They are brilliant, because there is limited clean up and it caters to making a cup of coffee while still half asleep. They even brought out a special edition coffee that took the intensity up to 12 – Spinal Tap would be proud. Admittedly, the milk it produces isn’t the best but it does the job adequately enough.
However, my coffee machine is not portable. So recently, while doing some work in Richmond, I was informed of a little place called Espresso 3121. As a follow up to my recent post “Soup du jour”, I was told that you could order your coffee from Espresso 3121 through Twitter. This is quite ingenious.
All you have to do is follow the business on Twitter and then send them a DM with your order. They’ll then send you a direct message back when your order is ready. You can see detailed instructions on how it works here.
While in the café , there is a large flat screen telly showing tweets mentioning Espresso 3121.
It is a really nice place, great layout and an awesome idea. Unfortunately, I drink soy milk and that meant a $1 surcharge (that seems to be a bit excessive). The coffee was ok – but for $4.50 for a small coffee I expect a great coffee.
Let me know if you are an Espresso 3121 customer or if you know of any other businesses that are using social media to place orders.
Tags: coffee, espresso, richmond, social media, twitter
I’ve always wondered actually, why cafe’s charge extra for soy – is it simply because it’s more expensive to source? Do they want to discourage purchase? (and given that soy milk tends to burn at a lower temperature, it would appear to be more fiddly to produce.) Anyone got any ideas?
My understanding is it is cost. It’s all supply and demand. Soy milk doesn’t come in 3 litre bottles and a cafe would go through significantly less soy than regular milk. A lot of places use BonSoy which can cost almost double normal milk. However, with that in mind they should charge more for skinny milk as well but I don’t believe that anyone does. Can any cafe owners let me know a more definitive answer. Is it a justified expense or is it just price gouging?