Human touch

Do you have a favourite coffee shop? What makes it your “go-to” place? My hunch is that while good quality coffee is important there are other things that encourage your loyalty.

Alternatively, there are reasons for not returning to a coffee shop. These also have little to do with coffee. I think that human touch or connection is a key motivator for our loyalty and when these are absent or poor we are unlikely to return.

Those who operate my chosen coffee shop know two things about me. Firstly, they know and use my name, and I know and use theirs. Secondly, they know my preferred coffee order.

Consequently, there’s no need to waste valuable time to provide the same information each time I visit the shop. They know who I am and what I like, and so our brief interactions can dive deep into chatting about our families, leisure activities, and interests.

Those interactions are rarely about coffee. They’re about our human stories. They offer warm, welcoming, surprising, interesting and safe connections. That’s why I keep going back, and I notice that a lot of other people do the same, to the point that we also begin to know each other by face and name.

Good coffee helps but there’s more going on.

We experience similar connections in other places where we are also known. They might be pubs or cafés, nail or hair salons where we experience the added benefits of healthy and respectful touch, community activities such as Choir 3006 through the Melbourne Recital Centre, or at our Boyd Community Hub and even our local places of religious worship such as St Johns.

Our souls ache for these connections and they seem to make the coffee or other products and services just a little more delicious and enjoyable.

Despite our astounding technological advances human connections can’t be adequately mimicked or substituted. I’ve used coffee apps linked to my name, but when my coffee is ready and my name is called there is little sense of any story that goes with my or anyone’s name.

There’s not even the sense that a story might be possible. The interaction is reduced to a digitally mediated, commercial singularity of production and consumption. The service might be tightly scripted and efficient, the coffee good, but a human touch is absent and the connection is cold. I have a sense of being alone, unknown and strangely unseen.

In our haste to achieve peak efficiency and growing returns we quickly forget who we fully are and so we stop going back. It’s a place that only makes coffee. It’s not the place for the sum of us.

Thank God for the sites of human connection scattered throughout Southgate. Thank God for the people who know and use our names, for their openness to our stories and their recognition of our presence.

Thank God for our collective refusal to allow technology to exclusively act and speak for us. Thank God for all that flows from the precious gifts of healthy and wholesome human touch as we launch into each day.

In this moment I am particularly grateful for the team at Pocket Espresso. Thank God for them all. •