Thinking in Waves About Coffee’s Third Wave (Tea & Coffee Asia, Dec’99/Jan’00)
I am not sure why I’ve waited until now to post this here (“The Coming Third Wave of Coffee Shops – Dec99/Feb00 – Tea & Coffee Asia“). The term Third Wave Coffee caught on in the 2000s, but I was completely oblivious of that for a few years. It wasn’t until a former employee, Joel Starr, (who, I am sad to write, passed away in 2008) told me (I believe this was in 2006) that he was having a dispute with regard to his blog’s domain, thirdwavecoffee.net (at this writing, available via GoDaddy). Joel was told that he did not have the right to use the domain because someone else was claiming to have coined the term. This discussion rang a dim bell and, with Joel’s help, I started going through old articles and found the one which you may open here: The Coming Third Wave of Coffee Shops – Dec99/Feb00 – Tea & Coffee Asia. (Tea & Coffee Asia magazine has now morphed into STIR, which is headed by the same folks that published Tea & Coffee Asia.)
When I was writing The Coming Third Wave of Coffee Shops, I was trying to think of a hook that would, like the rug in the Big Lebowski’s Living Room, hold the article together. Thinking about the history of the coffee business, I remembered a book by Alvin Toffler, published in 1980, called The Third Wave. In its biography of Toffler, Wikipedia describes the book thus, “In The Third Wave, Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of “waves”—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.” So, the title, “Coffee’s Third Wave,” seemed descriptive, catchy and a bit grandiose; I thought it was funny to compare the progress of the specialty coffee business with the sweep of world history — my use of the term was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
In reviewing the article now, I recall that it was written in the context of a regular column called Ground Zero – the idea was that I was sending these articles in from the West Coast of the U.S. and readers of the magazine were asked to consider that geographic area “Ground Zero” for the specialty coffee phenomenon. This makes the Third Wave metaphor, initially at least, a little more parochial than it is now considered to be… or at least that’s how we originally framed it.
Anyway, getting back to Joel, he was being told that he could not use the term Third Wave Coffee because someone else was asserting that they coined the term in 2003. But, after unearthing my earlier article I felt empowered to allow Joel its use due to my previously coining the term in the DEC1999/JAN2000 issue of Tea & Coffee Asia. After Joel sent out news of my article (but before he scanned the thing), the other arguer responded to Joel that this was not possible and that they did not believe that I thought in waves, (“I don’t think Tim Castle thinks in Waves,” this person wrote to Joel). This stung because one of my many handicaps is that I do think in waves, usually in a multiplicity and cacophony of them such that it’s often difficult to come to any conclusion at all… So, having paid a horrible price for thinking this way, I didn’t want to be denied credit for doing that very thing. (But, then, waves of mitigating and contradictory thoughts occur to me… well, never mind.)
Additionally, and here I will speak up for the metaphor, it seemed that, throughout the 1990s, specialty coffee was going through a reassessment and while some folks were working to rapidly expand their businesses, others were reassessing and, like waves on a beach, receding a bit and preparing for further roll-outs after that. From that period a lot of small chains started up that have continued as regional coffee companies, still owned by the original owners and still committed to quality over expansion.
While this is all ancient history at this point, it made me think, such as I do, when I was recently asked what was the last thing that surprised me about our industry, about this little kerfuffle — our industry sector could really use more surprises (and a few more neologisms), if coining of the term Third Wave Coffee has been worth fighting over. (I will admit, though, it’s fun to think up a term and then see people use it. Next time I’d like to do it on purpose and, even better, get royalties.)
Alvin Toffler, by the way, understood the usefulness of coining terms. He came up with the term Futureshock in 1970, The Third Wave in 1980 and Information Overload sometime after the wide use of the internet. He also enjoyed turning conventional thinking on its head — U.S. News & World Report, upon Toffler’s death in 2016, said that this observation was his most famous, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” More interesting to me (and scarier) is, “The problem is not whether [people] can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem … is whether [they] can survive freedom.”
