Coffee To the Rescue

I spend my early mornings with my coffee and the DELETE button. Drinking the liquid I love while getting something accomplished. It’s just a great way to start my day.” So said a friend in describing the joy of hitting the delete button and eliminating all the emails from Nigerian Princes, politicians, banks, cheap airline deals and free credit scores. He swears he couldn’t do it without the coffee. “Sometimes it takes two cups,” he said.

Delta Airlines learned the soothing power of free coffee. It’s no secret that this summer, travel has been well, challenging. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Peculiar travel arrangements are dancing lessons from God.” We are doing a lot of dancing. So recognizing that thousands of canceled and delayed flights make us grumpy, Delta rolled out the “Care Carts”. Nothing complicated, free coffee and soft drinks. A simple gesture that helped soothe the wild customer beast.

To paraphrase Delta Chief Customer Experience Officer Allison Ausband, “Our teams have long delivered carts stocked with coffee and snacks to help customers refresh at the gate. The Care Carts was having such a positive on our customers and our people, I knew we had to put them in all airports, and quickly,”

Of course, we would rather not deal with spam messages. And of course passengers would rather just get wherever they're going. But if coffee can give us the sense that we are getting something done first thing in the morning or that things will be all right and we will get to where we want to go, I’ll have another cup.