I love the passion in the text on this sign I saw on the street a couple of days ago. They are targeting people who like aquariums as a hobby and then pitch: Come on in, you’ll LOVE IT!.

Passion is important to special interest businesses. If builds trust for people who share the interest and with those open to considering taking it up.

In a city like New York with many businesses and extraordinary foot traffic, grabbing attention is a challenge. The key is to express yourself clearly and with volume. This sign does that for me.

Getting good coffee in the US in a challenge. Just about every cup is a reminder that in Australia we are spoilt. Here, the dominant Starbucks model is more about the meeting place and how they can trick a coffee into something beyond the drink I love.

I heard Howard Schultz, CEO os Starbucks, speak at a conference on Monday. He was inspiring. he was also proud of the level of employee ownership of the company and that every employee has access to health care – vital in the US.

Howard Schultz’s speech got me looking at Starbucks in a different light.  While their coffee does not taste better, I now take more notice of what goes on inside the business and how their employees engage.

This morning, in a Starbucks on West 53^rd and Broadway, I had my best Starbucks experience ever … all because of one employee who clearly loved what they were doing and loved making customers happy.

This young lady helped manage customer traffic – important to keep the wait down – and she had a good banter with shoppers.  Then, when a song came on their in-store radio, she sang at full voice and busted some dance b=moves behind the espresso machine.

Here is busy manhattan in one of thousands of cookie-cutter Starbucks outlets across the US, I got an authentic, engaged and enjoyable experience. This is the Starbucks I want to come back to. This is where I felt most welcome. The coffee didn’t matter.  This felt real.

Being a customer in a chain store can feel heartless. The employees can appear zombie like and the appreciation bland and meaningless. It’s tough serving in a mass market from a store that is one of thousands under the same shingle.

This morning in Starbucks, the lesson I got was that a great employee can make for a great experience and be key to building a great business.

Often newsagents complain to me about employees. We need to remember we hire them, manage them, motivate them, train them and fire them. We business owners determine how good our employees are.

Footnote: the screen in the photo is updates with each song played. It displays what you can see and other information through the song. Clever. Music is an important part of the Starbucks experience and has been for many years.

Second footnote: In 2008 I read How Starbucks Saved My Life – about a guy down on his lick and being picked up by Starbucks. I recommend it.

More and more retailers are flipping their model and moving from a store designed to help shoppers move through quickly, purchase and leave to a model where the store is a destination for more than for what the store is traditionally known.

The photo (click on the image for a larger version) shows a bar inside the Whole Foods Market store I visited (and wrote about) on the Upper West Side of New York a couple of days ago. Yes, a bar in a supermarket. In fact, we had lunch there and a few drinks … in a supermarket.  From where we sat we could see people doing their shopping.  Indeed, some came into the supermarket operated bar for a drink mid shop.

The bar and the extraordinary range of many product categories in this store and the over full aisles – yes the store is not the traditional blocked and wide-aisle supermarket – make this a destination supermarket where you could happily spend hours exploring food, shopping , eating and socialising. This is not a supermarket how we think of them. The model has been flipped.

The Australian newsagency model has primarily been about convenience – location, ease of parking and fast shopping.  As more retailers have taken on what we offer, convenience is not as important.

This supermarket visit leaves me thinking more about destination opportunities for newsagents that could have shoppers staying longer, making speed of the shop less important.  I have written several times in the past about coffee (and some newsagents have run with this). I still think coffee, either take-out or as a destination, works for many newsagent situations. Equally, a cafe or some other food offer works. There are others too which I’ll explore another time.

In this post I wanted to note simply that in this supermarket I have got to see an excellent example of flipping the model and thereby making visiting the store more compelling for shoppers. We should not be bound by the tradition of our model.

Here is another photo from the Whole Foods Market store in New York that I mentioned yesterday. This photo (click on the image for a larger (tastier) version) shows one of the mushroom displays. I say one of as this is not their only range of mushrooms.

I love mushrooms and stood in front of this display in awe of the range they had on offer. If I lived within a reasonable distance I know I’d come to this store for their mushroom range alone.  Another shopper nearby commented to me … great range huh? I love their mushrooms.

Whole Foods is like that, I saw evidence of shoppers as evangelists for the business.  How valuable is that?!

To me, the display is a message about the value of specialisation. As I mentioned yesterday, the population in New York is quite different to areas we serve but we can cut out cloth accordingly. People will travel for a better range of products they love.

Retailers who represent passion for niche products and areas will benefit from loyalty from shoppers interested in these niche products, like mushrooms.

I love mushrooms.