My friend Ed Godfrey may look like he hit his prime as a Stigler High School football star back in the 1970s, but he’s really a guy full of ideas for the 2020s
Ed and I like to meet in coffee shops across the OKC metro and solve the world’s problems over a cup of Joe.
Ed takes his coffee black, thank you very much.
Anyway, we were sitting in a local bagel place last week talking about a new family-owned coffee shop some friends of mine recently launched in Bethany. It’s called MentaliTEA and Coffee. The owners are Steve and Lisa Buck and their daughter Avery.
I had already sampled the Bucks’ new shop, and Ed wanted to know what it offered.
I responded that it offered a relaxing setting with great spots for conversation, along with the usual coffee shop menu of drip coffees, various espresso drinks, teas and pastries. It even offers hot biscuits.
Ed thought about that for a few seconds.
“I think we ought to open up our own coffee shop,” he finally said. “We’ll call it Vintage Coffee. No espresso machine. No fancy pastries. Donuts only.”
I laughed at the thought of a straight coffee-only coffee shop run by a couple of old school geezers.
“We’re going to offer only Folgers, Maxwell House and Sanka, which was my father’s favorite coffee,” Ed continued. “It’s like a step back in time.”
He was rolling now. It would be located not in the heart of the metro, but in a rural community where they might still appreciate coffee out of a can the way their fathers and grandfathers drank it
“We don’t need any baristas, either,” he said. “Pour it into a cup and stir it up.”
I was already seeing Formica countertops.
Ed also is the guy who had the excellent idea to connect community events across Oklahoma like the Rush Springs Watermelon Festival with the Oklahoma City Dodgers baseball team.
We haven’t seen any watermelon seed-spitting contests yet as between-inning entertainment, but it could happen.
Ed’s already working on outreach for his coffee shop concept.
He knows that I’ve worked for years with the Love’s Entrepreneur’s Cup collegiate business plan competition. It’s an event in which teams of students from college campuses across Oklahoma pitch innovative ideas to panels of judges with thousands of dollars of cash prizes on the line.
“Maybe one of those college teams could take this idea and win the Love’s Cup,” Ed said.
It could happen.
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