My German friends Helene and Othmar had invited me for a 'Kaffee Klatsch' at the Coffee Club in the Bay, and since it was their shout and I had to pick up a parcel from the post office anyway, I was happy to oblige.
The two Greeks who "invented" the Coffee Club franchise in Brisbane in 1989 must be laughing into their coffee cups every time another sucker buys into one of their coffee shops. After all, how could their business model of serving up cups of coffee at inflated prices justify a half-million-dollar entry price? (not to mention the ongoing marketing and franchise fees and percentage-of-turnover "kickbacks" to the "inventors")
I'd much rather copy the Treehouse Cafe's business model or corner the whole market by giving away FREE cups of coffee. I could to do that for several years and still be ahead of those guys who bought a Coffee Club franchise for the price of a city house (or two in the country).
But that's not what I discussed with Helene and Othmar who always insist that we talk in the language from "dem Land der Dichter und Denker" which I can still do easily but no longer willingly. I mean, if language could elicit psychoanalysis, German would have to be a top candidate. Some of the words are so long, they ought to be spoken with intermissions for refreshments (I know, Mark Twain once wrote something like that but he's been out of copyright for a long time).
Over two cups of black coffee and a hot chocolate - we never order latte which is nothing but a brewed beverage made by adding five dollars to a cup of coffee - we succeeded to sort out all the world's ills from the sacking of Rome by the Huns to Donald Trump's latest tweet.
By lunchtime I was back again at "Riverbend" and miles away from the Krauts, and they from me. And no one had mentioned the war.
