I Blame Joe DiMaggio

I blame it all on Joe DiMaggio


There was a time when buying coffee was easy. You went to the Piggly Wiggly or as my dad would call it the Hoggly Woggly and cruise down Isle 5 marked [Coffee, Tea, and Dry Goods] and look for either Maxwell House or Foldgers. It took all of five seconds to decide red can or blue can, oh and back then they were cans. Then you would go up to Peggy Ann the cashier with the bee-hive hairdo and the ice pink lip stick and she would ring it up. You would give her your dollar ninety-five for your 3 lb can of coffee and go home. Open it with the hand crank can opener because for some unknown reason the electric one would never open the can all the way. Then you would put it in your Proctor Silex percolator plug it in and let it percolate. You could smell the coffee for 3 blocks.



Then came that damn Joe DiMaggio and his Mr. Coffee. He sold us all on how much better it was to send steaming hot water through a basket holding your coffee grounds and force it into the waiting pot down below. We still used our red or blue can of coffee, if you were exotic you could use Farmer’s in the brown can, it had a bit of chicory in it. I guess though the method changed the product was the same and it was still easy to buy coffee.

Then they got a little bit fancier, decided that we needed to grind our own beans. It would taste better that way. So we went out and purchased a grinder, not the old hand crank grinder that my grandparents would have used, but a new electrified fancy-smanzy coffee grinder. Well in order to use the grinder you have to buy coffee beans. Now instead of going to the Hoggly Woggly to buy coffee you had to go to a coffee store to buy beans. Could you walk in and say “Hey Fred, give me a couple pounds of Folders un-ground”? No you had to choose from Ethiopian or Sumatra. First of all if they have coffee in Ethiopia then don’t they have donuts or muffins or even coffee cake? I mean you can’t have coffee without pastry. So it stands to reason if they have coffee and pastry in Ethiopia they can’t be starving.

Sorry, I digress, back to the point. You’re standing in this coffee specialty store trying to choose between rainforest breakfast blend or Kopi Luwak, which by the way is a coffee that is partially digested by a Civet (cat like animal in Indonesia) then excreted. (side note here: I AM NOT DRINKING ANYTHING MADE FROM CAT SHIT!) Did the madness end there? Oh, I think not.

In another time a coffee shop was a place that old men met for coffee and breakfast, sat around smoked cigarettes and talked. There were bee-hived waitresses named Flo who was always just a puff away from taking the whole place out with her cigarette too close to her Aqua Net. Now they are high end, internet café, meeting places. The “barista’s” names are Seven or Halo. You can’t just go in and order a coffee with a little cream or God forbid, black. Now when you order it sounds more like the name of a law firm. Yes, I’ll have a dopo, latte, double blend and whipped. Make sure you make that extra hot and double cupped. We now pay five bucks for a cup of Joe that used to cost 25 cents and even less than that if you made it at home in your percolater.

This all started when we gave up our Proctor Silex stainless steel percolator and gave in to Joe.
Got to run, my venti skinny vanilla latte, double cupped extra hot is ready.