The Opposite of Capitalism
In the course of looking for commentary about Michael Idov's ill-fated coffeehouse venture, I came across the article that I linked in my post on the subject which had another detail, left out of Idov's own brief account which I heard on Day to Day and which was posted on Slate.com - the fact being that they refused to sell flavored coffees, which it seems that customers wanted and were asking for, because in his mind flavored coffees were an inferior drink that people shouldn't be drinking. (This may help explain some of the marital friction that resulted from the project.)
High-minded food snobs to the end, the two refused to resort to crowd-pleasing business strategies like serving flavored coffee.
"We alienated as many people as we attracted," Idov admits.
That bit stuck with me and catalyzed with the line that already had stuck with me - I almost titled that first post this, but it would have required me to do a huge info/opinion dump to explain it - in which he claimed that "The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper-all the way to Barbie tea sets-than any other capitalist urge."
The reason being, there is nothing "capitalist" about what Idov was doing, or about the impulse to open a coffeehouse or other small mercantile venture. "I do not think that word means what you think it means" is the appropriate response to most uses of the word, such as when hipster quasi-liberals boast of how "capitalist" they are, meaning that they want to have nice things and get a good paycheck to afford them. Very few of them mean that they like working for someone who exploits them, or that they are ambitious to own a sweatshop or sweatshop-dependent company, which are the two true alternatives going by the Marx def. of capitalism.
Now I know that pro-sweatshop, pro-plutocrat Wormtongues have spent a lot of time and energy muddying the verbal waters, elliding definitions in the popular culture so as to make it seem that wanting to run your own small farm or your own bookstore or your own tailor's shop is exactly the same as being CEO of Archer Daniel Midlands or Borders Books & Music or the clothing buyer for Wal*Mart. But it isn't. It's inherently different. And Idov provides a perfect opportunity to demonstrate this.
"To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it."
Now, most of Idov's problems were of his (or, given that Lily Idov was apparently as deeply in thrall to The Dream as he was, their) own making: they are imo like the people who (every year) go hiking up Mt. Washington in shorts and t-shirts because it's 75F at the bottom of the mountain, don't pay attention to the weather warnings, and don't worry about getting lost on the trail because they have cell-phones. (The ones who survive and don't freeze to death presumably have learned not to do it again, but I wonder what the recidivism rate is. Still probably far less than the number of people who go on into repeat restaurant-sinking.) They didn't do the research - any research - on what restauranting entails and how it can go wrong. They had the fantasy of going to play house, and quickly found out that running a real house isn't like playing house in the back yard and going in to a dinner Mommy has cooked and sleeping in beds she has made up for you, and got bored and grumpy at having to do real chores.
Like a five-year-old climbing into the cab of a truck someone has left running, thinking s/he knows how to drive because of watching adults do it, how hard can it be? there was no way this could not end in disaster. And when it did, they blamed everybody else for their failures - their friends didn't subsidize them, their public did not give them the adoration they deserved, the world did not offer them cheap materials to make their jobs easier.
Predictable, that Idov only dimly seems to realize that his rejection of an opportunity to make money when customers were trying to give it to him, because he was too noble, too aristocratic to soil his hands with their filthy tacky flavored coffees, was the ringing of the nail under the undertaker's hammer - for this, and for every other venture he will try to undergo, unless he gets a personality transplant first. (Which I doubt, since he seems to have failed upward, being rewarded for his screwup by being given a book contract to whine about it some more, and fled back into .)
It's possible that the location he picked was nonviable. I've seen that happen - I can think of one place in this town and two the next town over where people keep on trying to put restaurants in b/c the building is already zoned for and set up as a kitchen, and which fail every year or two because the location is horrible and there just isn't enough different about them to overcome that disadvantage. (OTOH, one of them eventually became a salon which has succeeded for I think 4 years. There are different metrics for different sorts of projects.)
But that isn't a given, given the cluelessness about all aspects of food commerce that infects Idov's account, along with his snobbery. Plenty of people do have ambitions to run laundromats or stationery stores, otherwise there wouldn't be a bunch of new laundromats in my town (one opening next week in fact, brand new shiny building in formerly depopulated inner city neighborhood), and several stores selling paper goods and fancy pens and inks and so forth in the area. --Maybe not the sorts of Serious Writers he hangs out with, but real people, some of whom live on the same street as me.
Clearly, however, if you pick a challenging location you're going to have to work very hard - and not just hard, but smart to make it work. And this is doubly so if you're picking something challenging to try to plant there. I'll explain this in detail later, but the Idovs' cafe was the equivalent of someone sticking an orange tree in the ground in Central Park and expecting it to flourish.
Every single startup in every field is a losing concern at first. That's the nature of business. No matter how big, or how small, it takes time and nurturing for one to get rooted, let alone thrive, grow big, and choke out interlopers with its shade. I knew this when I was 16 years old. Nature is an inveterate gambler: most hatchlings are gobbled up within hours, most seeds never sprout and most sprouts never root. I walked under oak trees yesterday, my heels crunching on hundreds upon hundreds of acorns, thousands of potential oak trees that would only ever feed squirrels.
How many years did it take for Amazon to start turning a profit? That Idov thought he could get it going and keep it going into viability without subsidization, without a continuous infusion of venture capital - especially when they didn't know diddly-squat about the fast-food business itself - goes to show how far he ought to be kept away from any business venture. That he didn't have any clue how long restaraunteurs work, or how hard, or how thin margins are, or how to effectively go about shaving them down - and didn't seem to do anything to solve for any of these equations either - well, it's a very good thing they had savings to fall back on, and that they didn't try to use them to patch the holes in their sinking ship.
Because what they were trying to do wasn't even commerce, let alone capitalism.
Remember how I said that the Idovs were doing this as a hobby? I was wrong.
What they were trying to do was run a Mission.
What do people want from a business? What does "success" mean? Or even "profit"--? We all think we know, that this is a simple answer - but it isn't at all. The more you look at it, the more you try to explain it, the more complicated it gets, even without people trying to obscure things even more.
Personally I think there needs to be some sort of INTJ-profile way of examining a business venture and classifying it, but all this is too sketchy at the moment to have anything that formal - what this is is more of a preliminary study, to try to help in the epistemological problem, the problem of how to think about this mess, but it isn't hard-and-fast, it's just the best breakdown I've been able to come up with in the course of a few days of bus rides and slow days at work (and thinking about said slow days, too.)
My initial breakdown is as follows:
WEALTH * FAME * VIRTUE * FUN
All of these are forms of PROFIT, and thus reasonable to pursue, within certain limits.
These are not imo quadrants to be gridded out, because they are not exclusive, but I see them as each having positive and negative aspects. They are more Venn categories, but again it's messier than that, because there seems to be some dynamic between each one, in which each can affect the others. It's easier if I describe my categories, something like one of the many keys to the Major Arcana.
WEALTH
Represented by the figure of Fortuna.
This can be positive: enough to live comfortably on, enough to (hopefully) keep the wolf from the door, to leave one's offspring better off than one's self - the Goddess, plump, attended by twin lambs, holding a sheaf of wheat and a bunch of grapes, before a landscape of fields, woods and towns.
Or negative: so much that one could never use it all, never even enjoy it in a hundred life times, more than enough to keep a thousand families in comfort, for the sake of owning more than anyone else - the Goddess, gaunt, standing on a heap of gold, attended by a coiled dragon, holding a closed casket, before a landscape of blighted slums, battery farm runoff pools, and mine scars.
FAME
Represented by the figure of Juno
This may be positive: Renown deserved, achieved by excellence in all aspects of the chosen trade, honors conferred and admiration won by deeds of valor, skill, and intellect - the Goddess, attended by her Peacock, crowned, enthroned, holding out her arms in acknowledgment of the acclaim of those who have benefitted.
Or negative: popularity sought after without the effort or intention to win it by honest means, the "bubble reputation" attempted by purchase, deception, and other forms of flim-flammery - the Goddess, seated on an unstable, tipping stool, her arms folded smugly, her crown a party favor on a stick held over her head by a masked Fool, her Peacock a magpie with its train ducttaped on.
VIRTUE
Represented by the figure of Athena
Positive: the intention to change the world, or at least some aspect of it, for the better; to use the leverage of the market to educate, to mend things in disrepair, to repair injustice - the Goddess in her solemn robes, holding forth her Owl on her wrist with extended wing, using the real bird to demonstrate the diagram on the board to a classroom of rapt students eagerly comparing it to their textbooks.
Negative: the attempt to change the world whether the world wants or needs it, to reshape it in accordance with one's own tastes, refusing to bend from one's ideology while ignoring the consequences of this choice - the Goddess in full titan-slaying array, with the petrifing aegis on her breast and her rod of chastisement in hand, her Owl hiding its head under its wing as she points to a chalkboard, shouting, her face twisted in wrath while her students cower under their books or take to their heels. (See also: If Galadriel had taken the Ring.)
FUN
Represented by the figure of Pan
Positive: the aim of enjoying one's work, of doing a job that is fulfilling and pleasant, at least as considered overall, even if it is hard and does not result in much of the other things - the God playing the pipes while villagers dance and accompany him on their own instruments as some shear sheep and others bake bread or tread grapes in happy, energetic groups.
Negative: the aim of enjoyment overrides everything else, to the point that the business is neglected or at least those tasks and aspects of it which are not so much fun, to the point of diminishing returns and even nonviability - the God sprawling agape in the middle of a scene of total collapse, revelers fallen down surrounded by empty bottles and empty baggies, the panpipes broken underfoot, while the sheep run off in the distance and flames rise from the roofs of houses as cooking fires burn unattended out of control.
Ed. - I have picked figures from Classical Myth to aid in the mnemonic devising because that's the mythos I'm most familiar with. Equivalents from other traditions, like Lakshmi, Ishtar, Saraswati, Bast, could work just as well.
Now, you may well be saying: P@L, this is silly - whoever sets up a business just to "have fun"--? Who thinks they can simultaneously attain Virtue by imposing it on the World and make a successful business career this way? To both of which I simply point, mute as a signpost, to the Idovs' story. They thought it would be - and should be - FUN, not like the dreary but evidently WEALTH-producing work they were doing, and were prepared (at least at first, at least until they had experienced want for the first time) to forfeit WEALTH for the sake of "hosting a perpetual dinner-party," playing doll's tea time with real tea and - unfortunately, real people aren't like dolls and can't be made to drink whatever you put in their cups. Which brings me to the VIRTUE part: note well that Idov refused to take an action which he thinks could have saved them, because he considered it beneath him.
Now this is where it gets sticky - was that a decision made out of a desire for FAME or for VIRTUE? And I think they are dynamically-interlinked, indeed - but I think that while there was some of each involved, and both dependent on the other, still in the end it was the VIRTUE aspect that won out. (It's not so simple as saying "Pride doomed them," see?)
Because while they started out sounding perfectly Beak of the Finch - perfectly Darwinian as WEALTH-pursuing inherently is: you see a niche, you fill - with "New York had plenty of French- and Italian-style cafés; surely there would be a market for something different, he thought," which sounds perfectly reasonable and not at all fanatical in the pursuite of VIRTUE or FAME - because doing something Different from all your peers is also a route (ideally) to Fame as well as Fortune - but then Idov gives his game away very quickly with his snobbery about ice coffee. If you don't understand why people would want to buy your product, then you're quite possibly not cut out to be selling it to them. Yes, cynical phonies can successfully peddle stuff they despise, but it gets a lot harder when you're doing it one-on-one. I know salesfolk who can, yes, but it requires a massive disconnect between inner and outer selves, and the ability to be able to switch it off at will.
It's really hard not to let the sneer creep through the insincerity. Doesn't matter if you're selling coffee, or books, or magazine advertising space, or music, or movies, or dayglow widgets. People can tell.
So he says:
But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day.
If you need to sell X dollar amount of coffee (and I'm leaving aside for the moment his stupidity about the croissants, because I need to do some research downtown, but all I can say is that I know for a fact that both the DD mass-produced croissants and the nice homemade baked goods at the two Latin American coffeeshops sell for much more than $2, and if the market here in the sticks will bear that with half a dozen competing breakfast coffee-and-donut places on a one-mile stretch of downtown then surely NYC could handle $3 per pastry, just as I will leave aside their screwups w/r/t to-go vs. sit-down customers and how to handle that) then it behooves you to do what ever it takes to bring it in, within legality and morality - assuming you're serious about making a monetary profit from the business.
And not going into debt and bankruptcy is one of those dynamic ways in which WEALTH is linked with FUN - even if you're more concerned with FUN than WEALTH, you need to make a certain amount of money so that it doesn't become the opposite of fun, assuming you don't have it to play with and are just doing the business as a hobby.
But Idov wasn't willing to do things which, by no stretch of the imagination, could be considered either illegal or immoral. People wanted him to add flavorings to their coffee. Not hard drugs, not baby seal extracts, not watering it down and selling it for the same (which mind you didn't bother him at all! any more than paying minimum wage) - just hazelnut and raspberry and almond and so on.
But Idov considered this to be low, unworthy - heretical. They had, in short, elevated their tastes to the status of a Religion, and were trying trying to make converts to their way of coffee-drinking, and while refusal to alter one's practices in order to survive is generally considered stupid when it comes to everyday life, it is considered admirable by many when it's done in service of an Ideal.
They were martyrs - self-martyred, of course - to the Cult of the Perfect Coffee Cup, as defined by Michael & Lily Idov.
(I don't know about you, but if I were to go into a coffee shop and ask for hazelnut coffee - and mind you, flavored coffees were the only reason I started drinking coffee, and while I will drink plain I prefer a nice Pumpkin Spice or English Toffee, and I absolutely only drink coffee with milk, since anything else, no matter how mild the blend, gives me stomach cramps - and instead got sneered at and told that I should want, and drink, something else that was Intrinsically Better - especially if they only had lackluster pastries that weren't any different from what I could get at Dunkin's, if a fair bit cheaper - I'd walk the hell out of there and down the block to the store that would sell me what I wanted without treating me like a sinner. I have enough psychological problems as it is. If I want to be preached at and pay for the privilege, I'll go to a church &c.)
How much the desire for FAME - and fear of losing it, or gaining its opposite, SCORN - is a motivation for martyrdom of all sorts is incalculable. But, I suspect, real: that is, I suspect that fear of being sneered at by their similarly-kulturny friends and (worse) enemies for stooping so low to conquer, was a strong goad in their choice of career suicide over snatching at the straw of success. But that fear of being sneered at by their peers for selling Hazelnut and Chocolate Almond along with the decaf and the sugar cubes would be incomprehensible to most vendors I know. I will have to ask at several next time I am walking downtown of a morning, but since they all carry them and I've never heard any angsting about it (plenty about the rising cost of flour and gasoline surcharges on deliveries of course) I suspect that it would be incomprehensible. It's not like the pride taken in selling homemade vs. frozen prefab pastries that I've heard from (successful) coffee-shop restauranteurs.
So, yeah - VIRTUE, in the end, was their preferred PROFIT, against which all others were as grass.
There is, I repeat, nothing Capitalist about being willing to go down in flames rather than sell to people the - morally and physically harmless, mind you - things that they want when they won't buy the aesthetically-superior (to your mind) things that you want them to want, instead.
There's also nothing mercantile about it, either: a good merchant, be he or she also artisan or not, finds a balance between selling the exquisite items that they're proud to present, and the lesser but affordable or more needful or more popular items that customers want and that they can manage to turn a profit by selling, instead of frantically dog-paddling until they go under. The only way it could have gone worse is if Idov had tried to be a real capitalist, and had bought out a big company to mismanage into the ground with his delusions of adequacy...
And as for there being anything tragic in the Cafe Trotsky fiasco (right down to the oh-so-clever name) - well, if an animal jumps into a niche it isn't equipped to survive in, turns up its nose at perfectly digestible food that isn't up to its finicky tastes, bites the hands that attempt to feed it, and hangs on until it has starved too thin to be able to make it even if it does move to a better niche, in what way is this not a demonstration of what "survival of the fittest" looks like?
Obviously, VIRTUE, like FUN and FAME and WEALTH, is going to be a subjective thing. But it's not too hard to tease it out, even when it isn't as obvious as Going Green or Winning Souls For Christ. And it will look unreasonable to those who don't share the same belief systems: for some, FAME will mean being splashed on every billboard, on every tongue all the time, while for others FAME means being regarded as the pinnacle of excellence by the handful of masters in their chosen field. To the first group, the time the latter spend diligently and painstakingly working to perfection will seem a foolish waste, the fact that they don't care that only a tiny number of people have ever heard of them or ever will, incomprehensible - while to the latter, the formers' lack of heed for the quality of their work (or what work they're doing, even) so long as they're popular will seem degenerate madness, for to them FAME is part of VIRTUE as they define that quality. And to someone who only cares about hoarding up a draconic heap, both will seem nuts.
But all will by their own lights and those who agree with them, be rationally pursuing their own gain.
This is why those who think that they are being clever and profound by saying that Money is all that matters, and using pursuit of cash and capital as the sole standard of Rational behavior, are fools who constantly fail to predict the markets.
If WEALTH were all, especially in the more-than-one-needs-to-be-comfortable, and if it were not cancelled out by a significant enough lack of FUN or FAME or VIRTUE, nobody would ever give up a stockbrokers' job or a cubicle drone's or a doctor's or lawyer's to run away to Tahiti, to become a painter or a poet or a musician or an organic farmer or a missionary of whatever sort.
This WEALTH/FAME/VIRTUE/FUN breakdown also explains why so many who go into it for the FUN or the VIRTUE especially, burn out and sell out when they hit the bigtime, or relatively shortly thereafter. The challenges of successfully running a Mission or a Hobby are not the same as running a large concern whose foremost concern is WEALTH, and even the FAME and the WEALTH that result are not enough to counteract the FUN deficit and the diminishing of VIRTUE. By taking it bigtime, they have destroyed it, and once the moving finger has writ it can be damned hard to cancel even half a line. (Yes, I was thinking of Ben & Jerry's but there are lots of others out there too.)
There's loads more to it than this, this is just surface skimming - the layers of problems involved in unrecognized exploitation (where do those affordable bottles of wine at Trader Joe's come from, now?) for one, the way that one can tolerate a lack of FUN so long as there is no actual pain involved, for the sake of WEALTH, the way that nobody wants to talk about the need for subsidization to make entrepreneurial ventures viable, and that those of us who live paycheck to paycheck and thus don't have a few spare thousands of dollars to start some dream business also mostly can't get bank loans to try to gamble that we will be one of those lucky acorns, that particular Little Turtle, the way that advertising expenses can either contribute to a company's viability or destroy it if done wrong, the way that businesses which hover on the margins of viability are vulnerable to economic droughts/floods, the ways that business owners both small and large constantly sabotage themselves in all kinds of ways (aside from Not Doing The Research like a bad writer) including how doing a job without any FUN in it can seriously crimp your financial profits, and refusing to allow your employees either FUN or VIRTUE can do the same, even while many will put up with a lackof WEALTH, as they fling up their hands in frustration and walk out forcing you to retrain or retrench - but this again is all just for starters.
High-minded food snobs to the end, the two refused to resort to crowd-pleasing business strategies like serving flavored coffee.
"We alienated as many people as we attracted," Idov admits.
That bit stuck with me and catalyzed with the line that already had stuck with me - I almost titled that first post this, but it would have required me to do a huge info/opinion dump to explain it - in which he claimed that "The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper-all the way to Barbie tea sets-than any other capitalist urge."
The reason being, there is nothing "capitalist" about what Idov was doing, or about the impulse to open a coffeehouse or other small mercantile venture. "I do not think that word means what you think it means" is the appropriate response to most uses of the word, such as when hipster quasi-liberals boast of how "capitalist" they are, meaning that they want to have nice things and get a good paycheck to afford them. Very few of them mean that they like working for someone who exploits them, or that they are ambitious to own a sweatshop or sweatshop-dependent company, which are the two true alternatives going by the Marx def. of capitalism.
Now I know that pro-sweatshop, pro-plutocrat Wormtongues have spent a lot of time and energy muddying the verbal waters, elliding definitions in the popular culture so as to make it seem that wanting to run your own small farm or your own bookstore or your own tailor's shop is exactly the same as being CEO of Archer Daniel Midlands or Borders Books & Music or the clothing buyer for Wal*Mart. But it isn't. It's inherently different. And Idov provides a perfect opportunity to demonstrate this.
"To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it."
Now, most of Idov's problems were of his (or, given that Lily Idov was apparently as deeply in thrall to The Dream as he was, their) own making: they are imo like the people who (every year) go hiking up Mt. Washington in shorts and t-shirts because it's 75F at the bottom of the mountain, don't pay attention to the weather warnings, and don't worry about getting lost on the trail because they have cell-phones. (The ones who survive and don't freeze to death presumably have learned not to do it again, but I wonder what the recidivism rate is. Still probably far less than the number of people who go on into repeat restaurant-sinking.) They didn't do the research - any research - on what restauranting entails and how it can go wrong. They had the fantasy of going to play house, and quickly found out that running a real house isn't like playing house in the back yard and going in to a dinner Mommy has cooked and sleeping in beds she has made up for you, and got bored and grumpy at having to do real chores.
Like a five-year-old climbing into the cab of a truck someone has left running, thinking s/he knows how to drive because of watching adults do it, how hard can it be? there was no way this could not end in disaster. And when it did, they blamed everybody else for their failures - their friends didn't subsidize them, their public did not give them the adoration they deserved, the world did not offer them cheap materials to make their jobs easier.
Predictable, that Idov only dimly seems to realize that his rejection of an opportunity to make money when customers were trying to give it to him, because he was too noble, too aristocratic to soil his hands with their filthy tacky flavored coffees, was the ringing of the nail under the undertaker's hammer - for this, and for every other venture he will try to undergo, unless he gets a personality transplant first. (Which I doubt, since he seems to have failed upward, being rewarded for his screwup by being given a book contract to whine about it some more, and fled back into .)
It's possible that the location he picked was nonviable. I've seen that happen - I can think of one place in this town and two the next town over where people keep on trying to put restaurants in b/c the building is already zoned for and set up as a kitchen, and which fail every year or two because the location is horrible and there just isn't enough different about them to overcome that disadvantage. (OTOH, one of them eventually became a salon which has succeeded for I think 4 years. There are different metrics for different sorts of projects.)
But that isn't a given, given the cluelessness about all aspects of food commerce that infects Idov's account, along with his snobbery. Plenty of people do have ambitions to run laundromats or stationery stores, otherwise there wouldn't be a bunch of new laundromats in my town (one opening next week in fact, brand new shiny building in formerly depopulated inner city neighborhood), and several stores selling paper goods and fancy pens and inks and so forth in the area. --Maybe not the sorts of Serious Writers he hangs out with, but real people, some of whom live on the same street as me.
Clearly, however, if you pick a challenging location you're going to have to work very hard - and not just hard, but smart to make it work. And this is doubly so if you're picking something challenging to try to plant there. I'll explain this in detail later, but the Idovs' cafe was the equivalent of someone sticking an orange tree in the ground in Central Park and expecting it to flourish.
Every single startup in every field is a losing concern at first. That's the nature of business. No matter how big, or how small, it takes time and nurturing for one to get rooted, let alone thrive, grow big, and choke out interlopers with its shade. I knew this when I was 16 years old. Nature is an inveterate gambler: most hatchlings are gobbled up within hours, most seeds never sprout and most sprouts never root. I walked under oak trees yesterday, my heels crunching on hundreds upon hundreds of acorns, thousands of potential oak trees that would only ever feed squirrels.
How many years did it take for Amazon to start turning a profit? That Idov thought he could get it going and keep it going into viability without subsidization, without a continuous infusion of venture capital - especially when they didn't know diddly-squat about the fast-food business itself - goes to show how far he ought to be kept away from any business venture. That he didn't have any clue how long restaraunteurs work, or how hard, or how thin margins are, or how to effectively go about shaving them down - and didn't seem to do anything to solve for any of these equations either - well, it's a very good thing they had savings to fall back on, and that they didn't try to use them to patch the holes in their sinking ship.
Because what they were trying to do wasn't even commerce, let alone capitalism.
Remember how I said that the Idovs were doing this as a hobby? I was wrong.
What they were trying to do was run a Mission.
What do people want from a business? What does "success" mean? Or even "profit"--? We all think we know, that this is a simple answer - but it isn't at all. The more you look at it, the more you try to explain it, the more complicated it gets, even without people trying to obscure things even more.
Personally I think there needs to be some sort of INTJ-profile way of examining a business venture and classifying it, but all this is too sketchy at the moment to have anything that formal - what this is is more of a preliminary study, to try to help in the epistemological problem, the problem of how to think about this mess, but it isn't hard-and-fast, it's just the best breakdown I've been able to come up with in the course of a few days of bus rides and slow days at work (and thinking about said slow days, too.)
My initial breakdown is as follows:
WEALTH * FAME * VIRTUE * FUN
All of these are forms of PROFIT, and thus reasonable to pursue, within certain limits.
These are not imo quadrants to be gridded out, because they are not exclusive, but I see them as each having positive and negative aspects. They are more Venn categories, but again it's messier than that, because there seems to be some dynamic between each one, in which each can affect the others. It's easier if I describe my categories, something like one of the many keys to the Major Arcana.
WEALTH
Represented by the figure of Fortuna.
This can be positive: enough to live comfortably on, enough to (hopefully) keep the wolf from the door, to leave one's offspring better off than one's self - the Goddess, plump, attended by twin lambs, holding a sheaf of wheat and a bunch of grapes, before a landscape of fields, woods and towns.
Or negative: so much that one could never use it all, never even enjoy it in a hundred life times, more than enough to keep a thousand families in comfort, for the sake of owning more than anyone else - the Goddess, gaunt, standing on a heap of gold, attended by a coiled dragon, holding a closed casket, before a landscape of blighted slums, battery farm runoff pools, and mine scars.
FAME
Represented by the figure of Juno
This may be positive: Renown deserved, achieved by excellence in all aspects of the chosen trade, honors conferred and admiration won by deeds of valor, skill, and intellect - the Goddess, attended by her Peacock, crowned, enthroned, holding out her arms in acknowledgment of the acclaim of those who have benefitted.
Or negative: popularity sought after without the effort or intention to win it by honest means, the "bubble reputation" attempted by purchase, deception, and other forms of flim-flammery - the Goddess, seated on an unstable, tipping stool, her arms folded smugly, her crown a party favor on a stick held over her head by a masked Fool, her Peacock a magpie with its train ducttaped on.
VIRTUE
Represented by the figure of Athena
Positive: the intention to change the world, or at least some aspect of it, for the better; to use the leverage of the market to educate, to mend things in disrepair, to repair injustice - the Goddess in her solemn robes, holding forth her Owl on her wrist with extended wing, using the real bird to demonstrate the diagram on the board to a classroom of rapt students eagerly comparing it to their textbooks.
Negative: the attempt to change the world whether the world wants or needs it, to reshape it in accordance with one's own tastes, refusing to bend from one's ideology while ignoring the consequences of this choice - the Goddess in full titan-slaying array, with the petrifing aegis on her breast and her rod of chastisement in hand, her Owl hiding its head under its wing as she points to a chalkboard, shouting, her face twisted in wrath while her students cower under their books or take to their heels. (See also: If Galadriel had taken the Ring.)
FUN
Represented by the figure of Pan
Positive: the aim of enjoying one's work, of doing a job that is fulfilling and pleasant, at least as considered overall, even if it is hard and does not result in much of the other things - the God playing the pipes while villagers dance and accompany him on their own instruments as some shear sheep and others bake bread or tread grapes in happy, energetic groups.
Negative: the aim of enjoyment overrides everything else, to the point that the business is neglected or at least those tasks and aspects of it which are not so much fun, to the point of diminishing returns and even nonviability - the God sprawling agape in the middle of a scene of total collapse, revelers fallen down surrounded by empty bottles and empty baggies, the panpipes broken underfoot, while the sheep run off in the distance and flames rise from the roofs of houses as cooking fires burn unattended out of control.
Ed. - I have picked figures from Classical Myth to aid in the mnemonic devising because that's the mythos I'm most familiar with. Equivalents from other traditions, like Lakshmi, Ishtar, Saraswati, Bast, could work just as well.
Now, you may well be saying: P@L, this is silly - whoever sets up a business just to "have fun"--? Who thinks they can simultaneously attain Virtue by imposing it on the World and make a successful business career this way? To both of which I simply point, mute as a signpost, to the Idovs' story. They thought it would be - and should be - FUN, not like the dreary but evidently WEALTH-producing work they were doing, and were prepared (at least at first, at least until they had experienced want for the first time) to forfeit WEALTH for the sake of "hosting a perpetual dinner-party," playing doll's tea time with real tea and - unfortunately, real people aren't like dolls and can't be made to drink whatever you put in their cups. Which brings me to the VIRTUE part: note well that Idov refused to take an action which he thinks could have saved them, because he considered it beneath him.
Now this is where it gets sticky - was that a decision made out of a desire for FAME or for VIRTUE? And I think they are dynamically-interlinked, indeed - but I think that while there was some of each involved, and both dependent on the other, still in the end it was the VIRTUE aspect that won out. (It's not so simple as saying "Pride doomed them," see?)
Because while they started out sounding perfectly Beak of the Finch - perfectly Darwinian as WEALTH-pursuing inherently is: you see a niche, you fill - with "New York had plenty of French- and Italian-style cafés; surely there would be a market for something different, he thought," which sounds perfectly reasonable and not at all fanatical in the pursuite of VIRTUE or FAME - because doing something Different from all your peers is also a route (ideally) to Fame as well as Fortune - but then Idov gives his game away very quickly with his snobbery about ice coffee. If you don't understand why people would want to buy your product, then you're quite possibly not cut out to be selling it to them. Yes, cynical phonies can successfully peddle stuff they despise, but it gets a lot harder when you're doing it one-on-one. I know salesfolk who can, yes, but it requires a massive disconnect between inner and outer selves, and the ability to be able to switch it off at will.
It's really hard not to let the sneer creep through the insincerity. Doesn't matter if you're selling coffee, or books, or magazine advertising space, or music, or movies, or dayglow widgets. People can tell.
So he says:
But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day.
If you need to sell X dollar amount of coffee (and I'm leaving aside for the moment his stupidity about the croissants, because I need to do some research downtown, but all I can say is that I know for a fact that both the DD mass-produced croissants and the nice homemade baked goods at the two Latin American coffeeshops sell for much more than $2, and if the market here in the sticks will bear that with half a dozen competing breakfast coffee-and-donut places on a one-mile stretch of downtown then surely NYC could handle $3 per pastry, just as I will leave aside their screwups w/r/t to-go vs. sit-down customers and how to handle that) then it behooves you to do what ever it takes to bring it in, within legality and morality - assuming you're serious about making a monetary profit from the business.
And not going into debt and bankruptcy is one of those dynamic ways in which WEALTH is linked with FUN - even if you're more concerned with FUN than WEALTH, you need to make a certain amount of money so that it doesn't become the opposite of fun, assuming you don't have it to play with and are just doing the business as a hobby.
But Idov wasn't willing to do things which, by no stretch of the imagination, could be considered either illegal or immoral. People wanted him to add flavorings to their coffee. Not hard drugs, not baby seal extracts, not watering it down and selling it for the same (which mind you didn't bother him at all! any more than paying minimum wage) - just hazelnut and raspberry and almond and so on.
But Idov considered this to be low, unworthy - heretical. They had, in short, elevated their tastes to the status of a Religion, and were trying trying to make converts to their way of coffee-drinking, and while refusal to alter one's practices in order to survive is generally considered stupid when it comes to everyday life, it is considered admirable by many when it's done in service of an Ideal.
They were martyrs - self-martyred, of course - to the Cult of the Perfect Coffee Cup, as defined by Michael & Lily Idov.
(I don't know about you, but if I were to go into a coffee shop and ask for hazelnut coffee - and mind you, flavored coffees were the only reason I started drinking coffee, and while I will drink plain I prefer a nice Pumpkin Spice or English Toffee, and I absolutely only drink coffee with milk, since anything else, no matter how mild the blend, gives me stomach cramps - and instead got sneered at and told that I should want, and drink, something else that was Intrinsically Better - especially if they only had lackluster pastries that weren't any different from what I could get at Dunkin's, if a fair bit cheaper - I'd walk the hell out of there and down the block to the store that would sell me what I wanted without treating me like a sinner. I have enough psychological problems as it is. If I want to be preached at and pay for the privilege, I'll go to a church &c.)
How much the desire for FAME - and fear of losing it, or gaining its opposite, SCORN - is a motivation for martyrdom of all sorts is incalculable. But, I suspect, real: that is, I suspect that fear of being sneered at by their similarly-kulturny friends and (worse) enemies for stooping so low to conquer, was a strong goad in their choice of career suicide over snatching at the straw of success. But that fear of being sneered at by their peers for selling Hazelnut and Chocolate Almond along with the decaf and the sugar cubes would be incomprehensible to most vendors I know. I will have to ask at several next time I am walking downtown of a morning, but since they all carry them and I've never heard any angsting about it (plenty about the rising cost of flour and gasoline surcharges on deliveries of course) I suspect that it would be incomprehensible. It's not like the pride taken in selling homemade vs. frozen prefab pastries that I've heard from (successful) coffee-shop restauranteurs.
So, yeah - VIRTUE, in the end, was their preferred PROFIT, against which all others were as grass.
There is, I repeat, nothing Capitalist about being willing to go down in flames rather than sell to people the - morally and physically harmless, mind you - things that they want when they won't buy the aesthetically-superior (to your mind) things that you want them to want, instead.
There's also nothing mercantile about it, either: a good merchant, be he or she also artisan or not, finds a balance between selling the exquisite items that they're proud to present, and the lesser but affordable or more needful or more popular items that customers want and that they can manage to turn a profit by selling, instead of frantically dog-paddling until they go under. The only way it could have gone worse is if Idov had tried to be a real capitalist, and had bought out a big company to mismanage into the ground with his delusions of adequacy...
And as for there being anything tragic in the Cafe Trotsky fiasco (right down to the oh-so-clever name) - well, if an animal jumps into a niche it isn't equipped to survive in, turns up its nose at perfectly digestible food that isn't up to its finicky tastes, bites the hands that attempt to feed it, and hangs on until it has starved too thin to be able to make it even if it does move to a better niche, in what way is this not a demonstration of what "survival of the fittest" looks like?
Obviously, VIRTUE, like FUN and FAME and WEALTH, is going to be a subjective thing. But it's not too hard to tease it out, even when it isn't as obvious as Going Green or Winning Souls For Christ. And it will look unreasonable to those who don't share the same belief systems: for some, FAME will mean being splashed on every billboard, on every tongue all the time, while for others FAME means being regarded as the pinnacle of excellence by the handful of masters in their chosen field. To the first group, the time the latter spend diligently and painstakingly working to perfection will seem a foolish waste, the fact that they don't care that only a tiny number of people have ever heard of them or ever will, incomprehensible - while to the latter, the formers' lack of heed for the quality of their work (or what work they're doing, even) so long as they're popular will seem degenerate madness, for to them FAME is part of VIRTUE as they define that quality. And to someone who only cares about hoarding up a draconic heap, both will seem nuts.
But all will by their own lights and those who agree with them, be rationally pursuing their own gain.
This is why those who think that they are being clever and profound by saying that Money is all that matters, and using pursuit of cash and capital as the sole standard of Rational behavior, are fools who constantly fail to predict the markets.
If WEALTH were all, especially in the more-than-one-needs-to-be-comfortable, and if it were not cancelled out by a significant enough lack of FUN or FAME or VIRTUE, nobody would ever give up a stockbrokers' job or a cubicle drone's or a doctor's or lawyer's to run away to Tahiti, to become a painter or a poet or a musician or an organic farmer or a missionary of whatever sort.
This WEALTH/FAME/VIRTUE/FUN breakdown also explains why so many who go into it for the FUN or the VIRTUE especially, burn out and sell out when they hit the bigtime, or relatively shortly thereafter. The challenges of successfully running a Mission or a Hobby are not the same as running a large concern whose foremost concern is WEALTH, and even the FAME and the WEALTH that result are not enough to counteract the FUN deficit and the diminishing of VIRTUE. By taking it bigtime, they have destroyed it, and once the moving finger has writ it can be damned hard to cancel even half a line. (Yes, I was thinking of Ben & Jerry's but there are lots of others out there too.)
There's loads more to it than this, this is just surface skimming - the layers of problems involved in unrecognized exploitation (where do those affordable bottles of wine at Trader Joe's come from, now?) for one, the way that one can tolerate a lack of FUN so long as there is no actual pain involved, for the sake of WEALTH, the way that nobody wants to talk about the need for subsidization to make entrepreneurial ventures viable, and that those of us who live paycheck to paycheck and thus don't have a few spare thousands of dollars to start some dream business also mostly can't get bank loans to try to gamble that we will be one of those lucky acorns, that particular Little Turtle, the way that advertising expenses can either contribute to a company's viability or destroy it if done wrong, the way that businesses which hover on the margins of viability are vulnerable to economic droughts/floods, the ways that business owners both small and large constantly sabotage themselves in all kinds of ways (aside from Not Doing The Research like a bad writer) including how doing a job without any FUN in it can seriously crimp your financial profits, and refusing to allow your employees either FUN or VIRTUE can do the same, even while many will put up with a lackof WEALTH, as they fling up their hands in frustration and walk out forcing you to retrain or retrench - but this again is all just for starters.