Family’s Coffee Cart Brewed Friendship ... and Competition

Everybody’s getting squeezed these days. You look around for a little stability and a little comfort zone. Good luck finding it. When you lose a bit more of the familiar--which is the way things always seem to go--you feel like the lemon that’s just been squeezed again.

That’s as close as I can get to grasping why customers are genuinely upset that a simple coffee-cart business has been hustled out of a lobby in an Irvine office complex.

In the grand scheme of things, what does it matter?

The couple who own the operation will be financially hurt but likely won’t go broke. Sodexho, the giant food-service company that is squeezing them, plans to replace the banished cart with its own, thereby keeping local patrons caffeinated well into the future. Even the vanquished cart people concede the company, which oversees the couple’s month-to-month lease, has the legal authority to terminate it.

Coffee is coffee, right?

Not really. To lots of people, it matters who serves up that brew first thing in the morning or at the midafternoon break. To people at the Park Place office complex in Irvine, thousands of cups of coffee have been served in the past 12 1/2 years by a one-cart operation owned by Karen and Jim Gattis and known as MJ’s Espresso. More specifically, for the past eight years, Joel Rodriguez has been the Gattises’ main man behind the Park Place blender, coming to know what kind of coffee that people want and what the customers’ names are.

Before the Gattises set up shop in 1989, Jim was managing a minor-league team in Florida, and Karen was pregnant with their third child. Jim’s brother, who knew the Seattle coffee scene well, suggested they open a latte stand in Orange County.

Karen says Jim’s response was: “What’s latte?”

After it was explained to him, the couple followed up and named their baby business after their baby daughter, Maggie Jean. “Jim said when we opened, he was going to give everything away for free for the first two days,” Karen says. “He gave away 1,000 cups each of the first two days.”

She’s recalling that story at 8:30 Tuesday morning while sitting in the lobby where their cart used to be. Overnight, Sodexho had it removed--apparently weary of the Gattises’ refusal to do so after being told in early July their long-running lease was being terminated in 30 days. The company later moved that date up to July 25. The Gattises were hoping for an eleventh-hour reprieve that never came.

As Gattis talks, several Park Place employees offer condolences. One of them, Tim Hoffmann, a regional manager for a home-loan company in the complex, laments the passing of the Gattises’ coffee cart.

“They have been an extraordinary asset to the building,” he says. “This is just another example of corporate America squeezing out the little guy and denigrating the service and friendships that have developed.”

Hoffmann refers to Rodriguez as an “institution.” Rodriguez says Sodexho offered him a job running its new cart, but he turned it down, fearing the company might be using him to appease longtime customers.

Taking note of the country’s well-known coffee chains, Hoffmann says MJ’s “is something much different. This is kind of like small-town America, and things like that are disappearing.”

Sodexho spokeswoman Leslie Aun replies, “Give us a chance. Let us show you what we’re going to have available,” she says by phone from company headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md. “We’re going to offer some really nifty things, and people are going to be excited once they get a chance to try it.”

Under their contract, the Gattises paid a percentage of their revenue to Sodexho, which operates a large cafeteria on the floor below the lobby. Aun, for reasons I don’t understand, refuses to characterize the Gattis cart as competition--although the Gattises sell coffee and so does Sodexho.

Aun concedes that Sodexho managers in Orange County handled the Gattis matter poorly. In the vending business, she says, it’s not unusual to get 30 days’ notice, but she quickly concedes that the Gattises deserved better treatment.

I accept her word, but it misses the point horribly.

It’s this simple: Sodexho, which has 130,000 employees and generates $4.9 billion in revenue in North America, operates a full-service cafeteria one floor below the Gattis cart. The Gattises started from scratch and have been working their small corner of the world for 12 1/2 years. They sell a product that Sodexho could be selling more of if the Gattis cart were to disappear.

Sometime after closing time Monday, it did.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sun-

flower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.