Coffee is Portable: A Rebuttal by Jason Toon

I don’t want to be too hard on our spokestroll Irk about the Coffee is Not Portable video he posted last week. I’m a superfan of the Maybe It Bothers Me More Than It Should series. And I shared similar sentiments in my callow pre-caffeine-addiction youth. But this was not his finest vituperation. No maybe about it: it persuaded me less than it should.

Let’s break it down. He opens this broadside with an extra dose of “broad”, sketching out a spilled-coffee problem that has reached epidemic stage. Then:

0:23 - In a fleeting dalliance with good sense, Irk mentions “spill-prone containers”. He picks up the theme again at 0:37 in more detail:

Of course, the poor performance of the standard to-go coffee cup lid is so well established it was the subject of a Seinfeld episode no less than twenty years ago. But maybe they didn’t get that show on the troll channels. Or maybe Irk doesn’t own a TV. I bet that’s it. He’s totally the type who wouldn’t own a TV.

Anyway, I’ll give Irk the benefit of the doubt on his obliviousness to how trite this observation is, and just say, he’s right. People should use better containers for coffee, with lids that work. Like these Contigo thermal mugs we’re selling today. What a coincidence.

0:49 - Irk is astonished to discover that coffee is among the many, many foodstuffs Americans “inexplicably” consume in locations other than where they are prepared. Of course, the “explanation” is a complex mixture of factors including suburban sprawl, the interstate highway system, increasing work hours, the rise of the two-income family, the decline of labor unions, and the mass production of cheap processed food. I, too, would prefer a way of life where we all spent leisurely, civilized hours sitting down and savoring food and drink in charming Renaissance town squares, rather than inhaling it at 70 MPH in our Subaru Imprezas.

But nothing about that is specific to coffee. It all started with hamburgers, which are even messier and less portable than coffee. Sorry, Irk, you just can’t blame coffee for the American drive-work-eat-drive lifestyle.

1:00 - Irk ties his mind in knots trying to wring out a strained soup metaphor. Alas, the fact that soup requires two hands to eat it, and thus cannot be consumed while driving and only with difficulty while walking, is just the first giant crack in this leaky argument. Soup is not available free in every office kitchen and bank lobby. There is absolutely no soup-oriented equivalent to Starbucks or the tens of thousands of other coffeeshops in America. Soup doesn’t generally contain habit-forming chemicals (except at certain establishments in Seattle and Denver). Nobody eats soup multiple times a day unless they’re recuperating from jaw surgery. Nobody ever says “We need to prep for the sales conference? Let’s grab some soup and talk it over.”

Soup serves such different nutritional and social functions from coffee that the comparison is bad to the last drop. Sorry, Irk, I’m not slurping up what you’re spilling.

1:33 - OK, now I’m starting to worry about Irk’s relationship to objective reality. “Regularly drenching the floors of every office, bus, and retail establishment with spilled coffee”? Irk, where are you working, commuting, and shopping? Where are these floors are perpetually soaked in coffee? Could they be, maybe, the floors inside your head?

1:50 - Irk gives the game away when he mentions “duck hunters” as one of the only groups granted exceptions to travel with coffee under his regime. Because Irk himself approves of invading wildlife habitats to blast the harmless, hapless inhabitants to bloody shreds, his fellow corpse-collectors get a free pass to do whatever they would like with their coffee. They’re doing something important. But if you’re, say, pushing your elderly, infirm grandmother’s wheelchair around the Botanical Garden so she can enjoy one of the last pleasures left to her in her final days on Earth, to carry a cup of coffee while doing so is an affront to civilization.

That’s Irk’s world. Would you want to live in it?

The only real problem he cites - shitty disposable coffee cups - is easily solved. Right now. Here. Today. Buy a pair of thermal travel mugs with nice, tight, spill-proof AUTOSEAL lids. Boom. Done. Take your coffee wherever you like and everybody else can either mind their own business or suck it. Feed your habit. Not the trolls.