What Brown Can Do For You

I'm dead serious about chocolate. I don't fuck around. When it comes to general sugar I'll eat just about anything, from Necco wafers to peeps. I'll even down a stale marshmallow circus peanut if I'm desperate. But for chocolate, I have standards. I won't eat a Hershey bar, for example, and Snickers are taken only grudgingly. And while I might scarf down Halloween candy at a friend's house or from the front desk at work I certainly won't buy most mass-manufactured chocolate.

I like the good stuff. High quality, well-sourced, local, organic and fair trade if possible. 3400 Phinney and Theo's, Fran's, oh my. Or Vosges from Chicago. Or Dagoba and the sinful semi-sweet ultra dark bars from the co-op. Dear Lord.

I was just reading about how Seattle's Fran's Chocolates (a.k.a. "The Best Overall Chocolateir in the United States" according to the "Book of Chocolates" and more importantly, yours truly) is opening another shop in the belly of the new Four Seasons Hotel. Sure, I'm excited about this, but I'm also still smarting from my last visit to Fran's.

You can buy their gold bars all over the city, but to get their coconut gold bars, which are basically like crack to me, you have to actually drive to one of their retail outlets. Unfortunately, they hire what appears to be the slowest, most incompetent work force I may have ever encountered in a retail environment. Everyone who works there is frail, skinny and scared-looking and moves at a snail's pace, which are not attributes I typically associate with chocolate consumption.

Shit, if I worked around chocolate I would be ecstatic. I'd probably be about 50 pounds heavier, but I'd look like I was in the throes of an orgasm and greet each customer with manic energy and joy. I would move at a blur, slowed only momentarily to throw back a shot of hot cocoa between raucous bursts of laughter. How can someone look nervous and pinched around chocolate? Did chocolate beat you as a child? Does chocolate yell at you? No, my friends, chocolate only gives. Gives joy, gives pleasure, gives cellulite dimples to your ever-widening thighs, but by god it gives.

So there I was at Fran's, standing in line with my coconut gold bars, my mouth filling with drool, when I witnessed what can only be described as a new level of inneficiency playing out before me. There were maybe 15 people in the store, roughly ten of whom were, like myself, just trying to purchase items they could grab from the store shelves. The other five people were purchasing boxed chocolate. There were four employees.

Two of the employees, looking as if they might break at any minute, were sloooooowly and deliberately packing chocolates one by one for two of the customers who were picking individual chocolates. One of the employees was sloooooooooooowly and deliberately wrapping a box of chocolates and the fourth employee, who I assumed was the manager, looking very much like a praying mantis but without the sex appeal, was talking to a customer. No one was at the register. No one was ringing up the ten of us who just needed something rung up. This went on for 15 minutes.

By the end, I was literally sweating, I was so angry. I am horribly offended by innefficiency, to be sure, but this was amazing. I almost expected people to jump out and announce we were on Candid Camera or something--such was the ridiculousness of the situation. Finally, after loudly suggesting someone actually man the register, to the murmured agreement from my fellow patrons, I screamed "this is ridiculous!" threw my gold bars onto the counter and stormed out.

I haven't been back.

I miss my candy, though. I'm not willing to punish myself by living a gold-bar free life for the sake of driving home a point. But I'm pissed. So what's a girl to do? Slink back and admit defeat? Force feed the anorexic bitches running the place until they speed up? Complain directly to the company? I want my motherfucking coconut gold bar!