My new car

Just a fleeting thought that I thought I'd make public...

Just bought a new car... a Honda Fit. Known as the Honda Jazz in the rest of the world, it's a sub-compact 5-door hatchback from Honda, and smaller and cheaper (it's around $15K) than the Civic.

Totally nothing particularly profound, but I noticed something about this car... when you first get into it, your first reaction is, "Wow... this is really nice for such a cheap car!"

You sit in it and the seats are really supportive and firm. The steering wheel (on my Fit Sport-model) is leather-wrapped and luxurious. The illuminated dials and gauges look like they belong in an Acura costing twice the price. The overall lines of the exterior are really slick... not the type of econobox design that you wonder if they purposely dumbed-down to make their more mid-priced models look better.

But then, after I owned it for a few hours, I started to look deeper. The little dial that diverts the air vents... is made of really cheap-looking plastic. I'm still waiting for the floormats to come in, and the floor-carpet material looks barely better than cardboard. Stuff like that.

The moral of the story? What you touch and feel... what a customer is most intimate with, is vitally important. When we first started murky coffee, I had six different plastic hot-cup lids laid out in front of me, and my wife and I took turns putting each one up to our mouths. How the lid feels against a customer's lips is a much more important element than many might think. If you need to skimp a little, skimp on the toilet... not on the toilet seat. Buy cheap tables, but never cheap chairs. Spend on nice lighting, and don't stress so much about how beat up your hardwood floor is.

However, next to lovemaking, the most intimate human interaction is through food and drink. What you offer becomes physically ingested... absorbed... it becomes part of their body. Never skimp on quality of the coffee itself.

I hear retailers tell me all the time, "I can't afford to go all-out on the coffee," or "People around here don't care that much about coffee." That's all bullshit. Someone probably said, "You can't have a leather-wrapped sport steering wheel and ABS and alloy wheels AND a V-TEC engine on a $15K econobox," too. See? A little creativity and ingenuity and you can make it work.

FYI, introduced in the US this past spring, every Honda dealership in the country still has waiting lists for over two months for this little car. You can drive off-the-lot a Toyota Yaris, Nissan Versa, Hyundai Accent, or Chevrolet Aveo (the other cars in its segment) whenever you want.

You wouldn't make love with/to a dirty sweat-sock, would you? Don't serve coffee that tastes like one either.