Christmas Coffee Cups

A few posts ago, I was ranting about coffee cups and Christmas as a marketing ploy.  Thinking about it, it’s only natural that coffee shops should have seasonal cups.  They’ve been trying to personalise the coffee experience, just like the cola companies have been trying to, and so no wonder that they changed the design of their beverage containers to make us think ‘ahhh, lovely, let me guzzle this and go out and buy another, this is fun!’.

It does lead me to wonder why the hell aren’t these people making a bit more of an effort during the rest of the year.  Christmas is not the main Christian holiday, Easter is, and so why don’t we have special; designs for Easter.  Or for other seasons or holiday, God knows the shops seem pretty bloody keen to sell us stuff related to Halloween, why not cups and cola cans too.  (Honourable exception here, Krispy Kreme, they make one hell of an effort.  I don’t know what’s in that orange icing they use, but it’s practically a legal high).

Given the drive for personalisation of your gulping experience by cola companies and coffee shops alike it is unsurprising that they seek to make the experience special with a seasonally decorated beverage holder.

Gentleman & Player’s favourite though is, you will be unsurprised to learn, the Waitrose coffee cup.

Let’s pause for a second to consider the Waitrose beverage.  If you have a ‘My Waitrose’ card (which is one of those customer loyalty cards that allows, depending on your point of view, either you to get reward points and vouchers and special offers or for the store to build up a profile of you based on your shopping meaning they know what you eat, what you drink, when you go on holiday, what birth control you use, when you menstruate, and can sell all this to, in ascending order of dreadfulness, other companies, foreign powers or Our Own Government!) you can get a free tea or coffee every day.  The idea is of course that you go in there thinking ‘just a free coffee, just a free coffee’, start getting your coffee, think ‘must…be…strong’ and then exit with at the very least a pastry and more likely a 42 inch telly.  Such is the acknowledged power of going to the shops for a bottle of HP sauce and coming back with an HP printer.

The Waitrose seasonal coffee cup is…it’s…well…it’s very Waitrose.  It’s a white reindeer and seasonal scene on a green background.

Two things.

Firstly, tradition.  Apparently, before the evil elves at the marketing department of a certain cola company got busy, the traditional colours of Christmas were green and white, not red and white.  This makes sense, as we have green Christmas trees in the house and the only red traditionally on offer is the breast of a robin and the claret spilled during the traditional family punch up (always after the Queen’s Speech, we’re not savages).

Secondly, it’s just so very classy and understated.

But surely they can do more.  Costa have four different characters, with the occasional variation, Waitrose can turn a cup into a collectable.

Obviously, a simple red dot on the snout of the animal turns a random reindeer into a beloved character.

A tartan bow, and we have a wee ‘Monarch of the Glen’ moment.

For our American Friends, who think nature is best admired when mounted on the wall of their double-wide trailer, a cross hairs on the forehead.  Actually, that’s the Scottish stalking method, if it’s an American, it’ll be a green haze and a line of print along the bottom that reads ‘cluster bomb option selected’.

I actually rather liked the Waitrose coffee cup.  Possibly because it was full of free coffee but probably because it was astatically pleasing.  The reindeer in question actually looked quite jolly, the green (Waitrose corporate colour though it was) was understated but festive, and appropriate, it was the sort of green you might encounter in nature.  Possibly in woods where fir trees grow.  Possibly at night, armed with a hacksaw, I couldn’t possibly comment.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

If you needed reminding that the festive season is upon us, you need look no further than your beverage cup.  Cola companies, of course, have a long tradition of festive cans, one even going as far as to adopt the festive colours of red and white as a permanent design feature of their cans (although there is a story that the red and white we now associate with Christmas is in fact a result of that particular cola company imposing their company colour scheme on the season.  Frankly, although the idea is cynical, it’s believable as, asked the questions ‘do you believe in Father Christmas?’ and ‘do you believe those bastards in marketing would even try to hi-jack Christmas for their own evil ends?’, I know which of the two I would be more confident in answering in the affirmative.  Having said that, if a cola company was responsible for the clothing colours of any character beloved of children, then, given the sugar content of the stuff they peddle, I’d of thought the tooth fairy would be a better example).

Cola cans now come in festive designs and, if you like that sort if thing, it’s all very jolly.  Ho Ho Ho.

But the fun doesn’t stop with a tin can.  Coffee cups now come with Christmas characters on them.  Costa are an excellent example of this, with four different designs of paper beaker, a snowman, a reindeer, an elf I think and, possibly, Santa.  Given the design limitations of a receptacle that, to be at all useful, has to have a rather abrupt straight edge to the top, they all look like beloved characters that have been in an industrial accident, but they are sort of jolly all the same.

Naturally, as soon as I saw them, I wanted to ‘collect the set’.  Be advised, drinking four cups of coffee in one day is sensational for productivity, next to useless for producing anything of worth.  You may well be typing like a demon, but the word ‘wheeeeeeeeee’, with another 274 ‘ees’ is not, as I soon discovered, acceptable content for an e mail or text.  At least not on its own.

In case you are wondering, coffee saturation is not best dealt with by drinking alcohol in a classic ‘you give a drunk guy coffee, so it’s best to give an over-stimulated fellow booze, right?’.  That’s the sort of idea you have after your forth store-bought latte.  I discovered.  It doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, the commercial signs of Christmas are everywhere.  The worse thing about them…they work.

Day to day, I have very little interest in port.  If I am at a restaurant and am having the cheese board, I’ll probably order a glass because a socially acceptable way to drink fortified wine and gives you the necessary courage to try the stilton brooding thuggishly and untouched at the end of the slate of cheeses that these bloody people insist you eat from left to right.  However, wandering down the ‘seasonal’ aisle of the supermarket at Christmas (in effect, the entire shop), if I see a half bottle, boxed with a cheese knife and a cheese board, I want it.  I don’t need it, I don’t particularly like it, but I want it.

The same goes for whisky.  I feel manipulated, I should not be thinking ‘must…have…scotch’ just because it comes packaged with a couple of engraved glasses.

In days of yore, Christmas was heralded by perfume adverts on telly (switching, at 5:30 on Christmas Eve, to holiday adverts, because in yore, Dads earned the money and had to be told how to spend it), now, it’s the same stuff you walk past every day, in a new box, that lets you know that the season of peace and goodwill to all men, and especially consumers, is upon us.

Branded for life

It's not surprising that the economic prosperity of your town, village, hamlet or postcode can be linked the sort of shops you have on your high street and the number of boarded up windows among them. What might be more of a surprise is that it is a sign of economic prosperity when you have a KFC in your post code rather than the sort of fried chicken shop that aspires to be a KFC. Rule of thumb - when you see a Dallas Fried Chicken place open, it's time to worry and when you see something called Tennessee Fried Chicken set up shop, it's time to Google 'estate agents' and when you see your first 'Alabama Fried Stuff' it's time to Google 'petrol bombs' and reclaim your neighbourhood.

Why this snobbery though? Presumably they fry chicken in places in America other than Kentucky, and probably do it quite well. Any Southern state will probably be no stranger to fried fowl. What might be more worrying is an incongruity such as 'Vermont fried chicken', although that's more intriguing than anything else, standing as it does next to 'Paris rolled sushi'. (Yet who could resist nipping into a place called 'Alaska Fried Blubber', and asking for seal and chips?).

Where does this brand snobbery come from? There is a genuine gap in the market between the global brands that dominate food and drink - peddling mass produced stuff that's made in a giant factory that, if the conveyor belt were to be set up in a slightly different way, could probably just as easily knock out tractor tyres - and the artisan brewed beverage or humanely reared (and presumably Swiss clinic slaughtered) beefburger. This is the gap plugged by local or national, but not international, brands, that try and look like their global step-parent.

If that's the case we're in trouble because it means that coke is an aspirational drink. (it's always coke that the local competition seeks to emulate, never pepsi. I think this is because coke is the more readily recognised international brand and comes in those jolly red and white cans and iconic bottles whereas pepsi...isn't that the one Michael Jackson drank? Best example of a local cola I ever tried was 'Corsica cola' which actually tasted way better than coke).

Today, the competing beverages such as Panda Pop or whatever have been more or less replaced by supermarket own brand value versions of cola, lemonade and so on. If you want to find local competition you have to try independent local shops and even then you're more likely to come across the global brand, but the foreign version that's been brewed up abroad. And it does taste different. Which is odd because the supposed strength of a global brand is that you can drink a coke in Thailand and it'll taste the same as it does in Manchester. Of course that's rot, the recipe for fizzy pop is syrup, gas and water but when the water comes via a bucket from a river where children are washing goats upstream, then the third world version is doing to have a special tang. And that's something we should be thankful for.

But it's odd that rather than celebrate diversity, the preferred business model appears to be to emulate uniformity. Possibly this is because you're more likely to go into a place that looks sort of familiar because, having been there once, you're unlikely to return. Luckily, the other aspect of the business model for these places is to stay open after the pubs are shut and sell chips to very drunk people.

Maybe this snobbery can be traced back to the emergence of chain burger places on the high street. Prior to the arrival of macdees the national chain was Wimpy. Crockery, cutlery, waitresses. It could never last. About seven seconds after the burger chains started to establish themselves the emulators arrived; 'starburger' being just one. Starburger was where you went to eat if, horror of horrors, if your town was not considered worthy to have a chain burger place. You could sit in starburger and pretend you were in a chain burger bar, you could even litter if you wanted to give it that authentic feel.

What's kind of sweet is that these places seek to emulate but not duplicate their inspirations. It's not like pirate goods at a dodgy car booter, presumably because it's harder to pack up a restaurant when trading standards come knocking than it it to bundle your fake trainers in a suitcase and leg it, and possibly because anyone considering doing this has learned their lesson from the sub plot of 'Coming to America'. What would be good to see is this approach applied to 'fake' goods. Who of us could resist a tee shirt branded 'Nikf'?

Of course, the snobbery could just arise from these places being patronised by the sort of people that cause the reflex unkind thought: 'chav' or the considered unkind thought: 'morlocks'.