STRONG COFFEE by DF Lewis
Drinks were a business plan that Thomas and Joanna considered could be quite profitable both for hot and cold weather fronts, due to the shortage in liquid assets caused by the Government squandering any balance between exports and imports coupled with miseconomies of scale currently rife in the brewery chains. They could corner the market, of course, before any long-lasting factors took hold upn the situation. Indeed, it was during a few months of temperate weather and text-book conditions of trade that the couple started stocking up on all manner of drinks, weak and strong in flavour, fizzy and still, hot and cold. They eschewed thick drinks like soup or slush puppies – since a drink worth its salt could be sipped or threaded through the teeth past the tongue to slake the gullet’s thirst, but not spooned. Above all, it should be able to be sluiced to the body’s lower levels like a swigger downing a yardarm of brew in one fell swoop, if definitions of ‘drink’ were worth anything at all in the scheme of things. A drink was a drink and the couple (who we know as Thomas and Joanna) thought that diversifying into all variety of stew, canned soup, cream &c. would merely blur the focus of market forces vis-à-vis their business plan. Dilute it or drown it, in fact. They needed to distill not corrupt or de-couple tastes with off-centre products that were neither foul or fair, nor drink or non-drink. Come the next season and the hoped-for weather front and the Government’s customary cyclical cock-up of supply-and-demand, they set up their stall in Buckminster High Street, offering cups of many different beverages to the passing trade … but when a gaggle of fun-runners snatched the cartons at full stretch of life & limb without paying even a sou towards its cost, there was a certain amount of head-scratching amongst the couple’s debriefing conferences. Thomas and Joanna did have variations and under-the-counter drinks like hot chocolate and bovril and ovaltine and hot vichyssoise and catchy songs that accompanied their launching upon the market-stall of their head office – but trying to palm these off on unsuspecting lager-louts on the way to the pub was not conducive to much. Of course, the business eventually fell flat. They had somehow forgotten that most of their potential customers preferred alcoholic drinks and so their market research (slipped past the bank manager in a moment of inebriation) must have been next to useless – or they had actually drunk most of their own stock dry before selling it. As an unexpected front encroached upon Buckminster’s boundaries, Thomas and Joanna toasted each other in strong coffee, with loud gusts of laughter. No point in crying over spilt profits or split sides.
