My Career in Coffee

It has been damp, gray and rainy since I returned home from my road trip last Thursday. Our evening row was cancelled last night because of the weather. There are some of the most amazing fungi growing up in my yard from all the moisture. This is the perfect opportunity to pull weeds. However, the mosquitoes are so bad this year. I get swarms of them around me just walking into the back yard.

Enough of griping about the weather: This entry will be to document my stint as a “small businessperson” working with Marsha’s Coffee Service.

Early “fold over brochure” promoting our coffee!

Back in the early 1990’s I was working on a job making evaporator cores used in air conditioning systems. The machine I ran was called a “clincher”. This was a difficult involved job to learn. Nearly half of my 30 years at GM were spent running this machine.

Marsha worked in my department on the midnight shift. She was one of the nicest people you can imagine. She had a gift of getting people to do pretty much anything she wanted. In a factory this is no small feat. To get skilled trades guys to do favors for you could be pretty impossible at times…….

Coffee and the factory pretty much went hand in hand. There were coffee vending machines around the plant dispensing horrible swill at 30¢ for a tiny cup. Marsha started out selling coffee at 20¢ cup with a 30 cup coffee urn, some Styrofoam cups, creamer and sugar for her midnight crew.

When the day shift would come in, they wanted to buy coffee from Marsha. Marsha worked out a deal with me and Bonnie who worked the rotating shift opposite me to keep her urns going for a set price.

This worked out well at first, but then business increased dramatically. It was in September of 1993 we decided to pool our resources and buy some serious equipment. Bonnie and I would be responsible for keeping the coffee going on our respective shift.

The bathrooms in the plant were located above the shop floor. We commandeered an area under one of the stairways for the coffee service. Marsha was able to get steel cabinets from skilled trades to house supplies and the coffee urns. Those urns drew a lot of power. The electricians ran a separate line for Marsha so we would not be tripping the breakers. There was a “mop sink” near by where the pipefitters tapped in and installed a separate water line complete with a filter for her!

Midnights and day shift were the most profitable times for coffee sales. When starting day shift there would be two 100 cup urns going along with a smaller 30 cup urn for decaff, and another 30 cup with hot water for tea and hot chocolate.

I never had any business courses so my attempt at keeping books was pretty pathetic. I still have the records of my enterprise with Marsha. Basically I just kept track of what I paid out in supplies and the money that came in and hope I had a profit.

Sales were on the honour system. Even at 20¢ a cup it was amazing how many deadbeats stole coffee and even money from us. I would say about a third of the sales were to folks who used their own china cups. When inventorying the Styrofoam cups used during my shift, I would consider myself lucky if the money that came in matched the cups used. Having GM paying our electric and water helped a lot too!! 1994 was the only full year I ran the service. I cleared over $5,000.00.

Our operation was always a bone of contention with the company that ran the cafeteria and vending machines. We operated in a gray area. If the company shut us down, by rights they would have to stop every coffee pot in the plant. There were many such operations like ours, just not to our scale!

I can’t say how, but another vending operation started up right by us. A commercial popcorn machine found it’s way into the factory and 50¢ bags of popcorn were VERY popular among the workers. The smell of freshly popping corn is so addictive! This was not Marsha’s doing. I’m sworn to secrecy on this one!

I was working overtime and covering the coffee service for Bonnie when my foreman Lou approached me. “Get over to the coffee service NOW.” He told me. “I’ll be on break in a minute” I replied. “Now, it’s the Board ofHealth, they are going to start cutting locks in a minute!” he said.

It was one nervous chinch operator who ran to the coffee service. Health inspectors were checking the temperature of the coffee in the urns and the cleanliness of the coffee dispensing area and supply cabinets. I was able to get all the locks undone. All in all the inspectors were very impressed and told me this was the cleanest operation its type they had ever seen.

The popcorn machine was the real problem. That was considered a food operation, which is forbidden in a factory environment. Sadly we had to say good-by to the popcorn machine……

Marsha’s flourished. Thursday’s were “Customer Appreciation Day” where-by bowls of hard candies would be put out. We would have baked goods for our customers on the major holidays and free coffee.

Working in Dept 862 was such a comfortable rut. I had worked in that dept for 10 continuous years. My mom died in December of 1994 and things in my life started to change.

There was little turnover in that department. We worked on rate. When you become proficient at a job it looks easy and when things go well you can work in some decent break time. That is what allowed me to run the coffee service and run my clincher at the same time.

In the early spring of 1995 management was “riding our asses” They were trying to raise our production rates and write us up for any infraction they could dream up. Time study people were clocking our every move with stopwatches. As factory workers we were regarded as the lowest of the low. Generally those fools in management did not realize we knew our clinchers inside and out. All I had to do when loading parts into my clincher was to do an imperceptible shift of my wrist. This would cause the parts to be stacked at an angle which would cause constant jam-ups. They were never able to do a time study on this boy doing that job!

I had been through this type of action too many times. Rather than go through all the aggravation, I transferred away to a similar job in a different building in the spring of 1995. A coworker Les bought out my share of Marsha’s and continued running the service on my old shift.

Moving out of Dept 862 was a good move for me. I credit that move and association with new people to my relocating to Alabama. That is another story all unto its own…..