New Hours at Coventry
Our new hours at the Coventry store are Monday thru Thursday 6 am to 10 pm, Fridays 6 am to 11 pm, Saturday 7 am to 11 pm and Sunday 8 am to 9 pm.
How Should You Tip Your Barista?
At Phoenix, we are thankful for the generosity of our customers who tip our baristas. We know that it's hard to know when to tip, how much to tip, and what is expected or even polite when it comes to tipping baristas. At a table service restaurant, the 18% guideline is firmly established. There really is no percentage guideline for counter service at a coffee shop, although on average, the gross tips from each day do add up to about 9% of the sales. Some people never tip, and some people tip $1.00 for their $2.00 coffee. We'd like to think that these big tippers are earning not only our appreciation, but also some good karma.
It's no surprise that our thoughts on tipping are quite different from Starbucks' position on the matter. In a 2006 NY Daily News article, Starbucks management was quoted as saying that Starbucks baristas don't need tips. “We don’t expect our customers to pay anything extra to receive our legendary service,” Starbucks marketing manager Dan Lewis explained. The tip boxes at Starbucks registers are there “to avoid loose tips on tables and counters throughout the store,” he said.
At Phoenix Coffee, our baristas do need tips, and we encourage customers to tip generously and often. We hope that our customers enjoy our authentic style of personal service, where baristas are given the freedom to simply be a person being of service to another person. We value this kind of personalized service, which is why you’ll never hear about a “standard greeting” or other service formulas at Phoenix. Instead, it’s our goal to create a warm, friendly ambiance at each of our cafes, where our baristas will greet you in their own individual way, and hopefully you’ll feel that they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.
Thanks for your patronage and the generous tips!
Compostable Cups Are Here!
The new Phoenix Coffee compostable cups are just starting to arrive at our cafes. These cups are the culmination of almost a year's worth of thought and effort. They were painstakingly designed by our in-house designer, Sean Higgins. As the new cups begin to arrive at each cafe, we will now offer you a choice when you purchase a beverage to go: either bring your own mug or buy one of our new compostable cups for $0.10 each. This nominal ten cent "green fee" is our way of encouraging everyone to adopt sustainable habits, such as bringing your own mug and minimizing the use of disposables whenever possible. In Ireland, the country reduced the use of disposable shopping bags by 96% by introducing a similar "green fee". We hope to reduce our use of disposables by more than 100,000 cups this year, and to compost just as many, thereby reducing our ecological footprint. Thanks for helping with our efforts! You can read our press release here.
About the Coventry Cafe
Our Coventry Café features huge windows with light streaming in around the fireplace, plants, many a Case Western Reserve student studying diligently, and Jessica Rabbit, the store beta fish. This café became a Phoenix Coffee in August 2007, a month after the previous tenant, Caribou Coffee, closed. This Phoenix is known for the neighborhood hipster regulars, as well as our local eccentric underground socialists and even one of Cleveland’s most successful artists, George Fitzpatrick, who lives nearby. The Coventry café has high energy and a lot of foot traffic, and it’s also famous for being where “Black Stacy” got named. “Black Stacy” is what we call our regular house blend black iced tea, it was named after Sarah Dallas’s cat (Sarah Dallas is a longtime favorite Phoenix barista). Coventry Village is one of Cleveland’s strongest independent merchant districts, featuring stores like Big Fun toy store, Mac’s Backs used books, Passport to Peru, City Buddha, Next Urban Wear, and Brigade clothing store. While sipping your coffee, you can also enjoy the artwork scotch taped on the walls from our loyal kid-fans and sketches from some talented local artists. Or, sit at one of our sidewalk two-tops for some great people watching.
