The Information Economy

This idea came out of our concluding thoughts on the Lavazza coffee pods in our last post and echoes some ideas mentioned in earlier posts.

The idea that a cup of espresso represents a blend of coffee beans naturally makes us curious about the percentage and interactions of the various beans. With the recent trends in single-estate chocolate causing a rapid escalation in gourmet chocolate prices, the coffee industry is ideally posied to follow suit in the realm of region identitified branding. To certain extent, we all ready have such labelling and marketing, but on really broad scales.

A move towards providing more information about the coffee beans, such as location, processing method, date of processing, commercial venture type (Fair Trade, etc.) would also be in keeping with certain aspects of the "new economy". While there is much talk about our being in an "information age" the "information economy" gets very little attention.

The ability to find information almost at a whim, creates a demand for more information. Marketers have responded to this by highlighting particular pieces of information regarding their products, creating a story about them, if you will. Thus, purchasing the product also allows you to purchase and retell the story. This was one of the ideas that David Brooks relates in Bobos In Paradise, the bourgeois bohemians, or new yuppies, have a story to tell about every object they purchase, whether it was hand-dyed cloth from a remote Andean village's women's collective raising funds for a daycare centre, or that it was a pair jeans made in Japan on 1940s' Levis technology left behind after the troops went home.

In many cases, the story is part of the allure and creates a demand for the uniqueness of the object. A cup of coffee is a cup of coffee. But how much would you be willing to pay if the coffee was organic and fair trade? Now, what if they told you that it was harvested every other year during a specific three week window by a particualr monastic order? And that the monastics claim that soil nutrients impart certain curative powers to the coffee?

For many, the story is the sell. In the information economy people want to know information about the products they buy, even if they don't necessarily understand what the information is telling them. Is it really important that we know exactly where and in what percentage the beans in our coffee are from? Probably, but only in the same sense that knowing the mineral content of the water we use is.