Author Archives: goddess

One blog cannot possibly cover The Pandemic. but here are some things we learned: People cared a lot about how the pandemic was affecting Carpe Diem. We had one of our mail order customers call us up and offer advice on how to secure government resources that were becoming available to small businesses. He guided [...] More

Celebrations: they’ve always been special to us. In the early days of Carpe Diem we would take our birthdays off and play for the day. One year Jane made blow-up pictures of Gussie and secretly posted them in the different places we went to play, the back of the door in the ladies’ room at …

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Entertainment: sometimes it is critical for getting the job done. Let’s face it, not every part of the coffee business is enthralling, especially after thirty years. But we do pull out a little levity and fun when monotony threatens to overtake us. One of our favorite games is to have Jane be the DJ and …

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Recently Jane’s right arm had dislocated from her shoulder. She knew immediately that something was very wrong. She had dived into water off a diving board on a boat and that’s when it popped out. The story of how she got it back in was pretty much what one would expect, with a visit to …

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Sometimes, redundancy isn’t enough. Recently, we ran into an issue with our shipping label printer. It had decided to stop functioning overnight. As far as we knew, nothing had changed between the close of business Wednesday night, and the start of business on Thursday. It always baffles us when something happens during off-hours that can …

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Swaps, tradesies, in-kind, barter, whatever you name it we have had some interesting exchanges over the years. Early on, in our first location a young man came around peddling hair-cuts. If you know us even a little bit then you will know that it wasn’t considered risky for either of us to get coiffed by …

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About five years after we began our business, we were asked by Stonewall Kitchen to give a proposal to be their exclusive coffee roaster. We were nervous nellies going into that audience full of eager, young, enthusiastic people. Having never really presented to a group of that caliber before, we called Gussie’s oldest brother to …

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As we became more confident with taking our show on the road we decided to go for an even bigger fish. Well actually, Phish.  In 1997, We applied for the Limestone concert and paid our vendor’s fee.  It was no chump change, but we felt we would have a captive audience eager to work off …

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Over the years as we became more courageous, we dabbled in new ways to make money and promote Carpe Diem Coffee.  One year we decided to have a coffee booth at the Bluegrass Festival at Thomas Point Beach in Bath, Maine.  We figured it was close to home if we needed to re-up supplies (which …

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