Minkchocolates

Man of Mystery or Mystery Shopper?

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Kate and Payal were the day’s lead baristas, languidly positioned at the espresso machine at the front of the shop, polishing cappuccino glasses, talking about things no one should overhear, when they noticed the stranger come through the double glass front doors. Hesitating slightly as he crossed the threshold, the man was broad shouldered, square jawed and almost seven feet tall. He was resplendent in a light blue seersucker suit, crisp pink shirt too tight at the collar, suede shoes, and white straw Porkpie hat. The girls weren’t sure, but the man may have been sporting a faded turquoise colored tattoo of a parrot on his neck just below his right ear.

The decibel level in the café dropped noticeably. The store’s playlist went eerily mute, yet no one put down their coffees; no one surreptitiously looked up from their mobile devices; no one cared to give the stranger the once over. The man’s face was hard as blistered asphalt and his soul patch black as coal. He carried a Louis Vuitton Président Classeur briefcase gripped tight in his left hand, almost as if he was expecting a fight.

Kate noticed in spite of all the jewelry his ring finger was unadorned. The stranger locked eyes with her, forcing her to take a deep breath. “I can help you over here,” she said, motioning towards the till. He wasn’t having any part of her instructions, and instead, pulled a wad of money out of his pants pocket. He deftly peeled a one hundred dollar bill off the wad with just two fingers, and let it float down onto the bar. Glancing first at Payal, then back to Kate, the man spoke slowly in a deep baritone voice, “chocolate, drinking chocolate.”

Out of habit, Kate answered, “for here or to go?” as she scooped up the money from the bar. Unfortunately, Kate’s accent caused the man to hear “for her or you go.” and that made the hackles on the back of his neck rise like an angry dog pissed at the postman for entering the yard without permission.

Working quickly to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation, Payal grabbed a newly polished glass and set it down on the bar in front of the man, and proceeded to make the drink. Kate instinctively knew to distance herself, and walked over to the till to ring it in and make the man’s change. With a fearsome shadow casting him from the door behind, the man took the now completed drink, and pounded it back with one swift tilt of his head.

He slammed the glass on the bar, causing it to shatter. “Hmmph, that ain’t no plastic cup!” he exclaimed, waving away Kate’s change as if to say a ninety dollar tip should cover its replacement. He turned towards the door, and strode out into the mid-day sunshine, disappearing in the bright mirage of swirling cherry blossoms, never to be seen again. Not as if anyone in the café ever saw him, except two gob smacked baristas.

Marc Lieberman

Mink Chocolates

Call toll free: 1.866.283.5181

Watch: www.youtube.com search mink chocolates

 

 

 

 

No (wo) menclature

Thursday, February 27, 2014

I’m a hands-on proprietor of a small retail business and like most small business people, I wear many hats. I have only one head of course, so wearing so many hats means people look at me funny. However, on the odd chance a polar Gore-Tex (the west coast version of what the rest of the country knows as a polar vortex) blankets the Lower Mainland, I’m prepared.

Wearing a lot of hats and being in retail means I meet and greet and interact with a lot of people. Often, a significant amount of time passes between meetings, and names are many times hard to place with faces. With my age advancing at twice the speed of the Gregorian calendar, this is becoming somewhat problematic. I’ve decided I’m going to call everyone Pooch.

There are caveats however.

If I previously called you bro, now I’ll call you bagels. If I used to recognize you as the more casual buddy, I’ll greet you now as Swede. A handful of people whose names didn’t fit their looks but who I either held in high esteem or generally cared for a great deal were referred to as home skillet. Now they’ll be known as home slice.

Any short blonde photographers previously called Trixie, will still be called Trixie.

If you want to be called something else and you’re not wearing a name tag I can read without glasses, send me an email. I answer to everything, including dada, honey bunches of oats, and aren’t you the chocolate guy named after a pointy nosed weasel?

Marc Lieberman

Mink Chocolates

Call toll free: 1.866.283.5181

Watch: www.youtube.com search mink chocolates

 

White Trash Trainwreck

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

If it was packed in its own carrying case, today it would be too big for the overhead compartment on any commercial airline. When I got my first fax machine in 1988, it was considered so revolutionary just being able to carry it into my office myself made me consider it portable. My friend Kent got one for his office at the same time. He was directly upstairs from me.

The machines came with a complimentary roll of thermal paper. Kent and I used up both our rolls within two hours of getting them working, faxing each other comics that we’d ripped from the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Occasionally we’d circle the punch line to ensure the other didn’t miss the joke.

Re-stocked with cases of thermal paper, in the weeks and months ahead, the novelty still too new and unusual, we’d communicate exclusively by fax for things we normally talked on the phone or in person about.

If a response to a fax wasn’t immediately forthcoming, it meant the clarity of the transmission was such the point was lost on the other, and you’d have to pick up the phone and say, “what did you think of that article? Oh really? It must be your machine. OK, I’ll re-send it.”

Had this year’s 4^th Annual Hot Chocolate Festival started at the dawn of the fax era, two people wanting to communicate to each other the virtues of our Paula Deen White Trash Trainwreck specialty beverage, would have to do something like this:

–       Go to a camera store and buy a pack of Polaroid film

–       Load the Polaroid camera with said film and head to a Mink café

–       Order the Paula Deen White Trash Trainwreck

–       Take at least three selfies of yourself enjoying your Trainwreck

–       Wait a couple of minutes for the pictures to develop, waving them in the air to speed the process

–       Recognizing that you’re not in two of the three pictures, discard them, and with the third in developing mode, use your thumb to push around the chemicals and distort the image to give it a psychedelic look

–       Go back to the office, tape the picture to a sheet of paper, and write a funny caption underneath.

–       Load it into the fax machine, and dial up the number of the person you want to send it to.

–       If you’re really aggressive, you might invoke the polling feature and send it to more than one person at a time.

–       Wait five or ten minutes, then call the recipient and ask them if they got it

–       Spend a couple of minutes talking about all sorts of stuff, and before hanging up, ask them to send you something.

In the brief time we’ve been running the Trainwreck, it’s been tweeted, facebooked, youtubed, vined, snapchatted, blogged and pinned. I don’t think it’s been tattooed. Thousands of people named Kent the world over can now instantaneously share the Trainwreck experience. If the 1988 me was transported by time machine to today and was shown all this, I’d quiver in my Keds fearing some voodoo magic. I suppose the next revolution will be the taking for granted your phone dispensing a cup of that Trainwreck with a simple push of a button.

Marc Lieberman

Mink Chocolates Inc.,
Mink A Chocolate Cafe Ltd.

Call toll free: 1.866.283.5181

Shop:   www.minkchocolates.com
Tweet:  www.twitter.com/minkchocolates
Read:   blog.minkchocolates.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/minkchocolates
Watch: www.youtube.com search mink chocolates

Call the Vancouver store: 604.633.2451