I was a vegan.

I’m fresh off a visit to see friends in San Francisco. If you haven’t been, that’s a city with an unmatched coffee culture, at least unmatched in North America. On Saturday, we went to the Saturday coffee place, which, for a non-coffee drinker like me, renders me clueless as to why it can’t also be the Monday to Friday coffee place. Or at least also the Sunday coffee place. (And yes we went somewhere else entirely different on Sunday.) See: aforementioned unmatched coffee culture.

Here’s the exchange between the barista and me:

Me: I’d like large non-fat latte and a small Pellegrino.
BD*: Would you like any pastry with that?
Me: No, thank you. Just the drinks.
BD: The pastries are amazing here. It’s what we’re known for.
Me: They look mighty good but I think we’re fine, thank you.
BD: Dude, I was a vegan before I worked here.

Stage direction: Cut to me walking away with a cinnamon roll dripping with caramel sauce and a blueberry muffin the size of a hubcap.

Now you might think I got snookered into some excellent salesmanship. And maybe I did but his hair that suggested the lack of shampoo and scissors, the tattoos running up and down his arms, the clothes fresh from the Salvation Army runways of Paris, and his quintessential vegan absence of any body fat or muscle (i.e. lanky) all seemed to validate his story. If it wasn’t true, he sure as heck looked the part. Welcome to San Francisco.

The brilliant guys at TargetX who advises colleges and universities on admissions always encourage tour guides to think, “Stories, not statistics. People, not programs.” BD could have told me how popular his pastries were or something about how supposedly healthy I’d find the blueberry muffin (program/statistics) but instead he made it personal, authentic, and he made the connection (people/stories). And I walked away with two seriously large pastries, both in size and price. Plus my drinks.

There’s got to be a lesson there somewhere.

*Barista Dude