Community, not competition — and what it costs us

Lucky's opened in June 2019 in the heart of Downtown Upland with an idea that sounds soft until you try to hold to it: community, not competition.

Plenty of shops say a version of this. Fewer mean it on a day when it costs money.

What it means on a Tuesday

It means telling a customer that the shop down the road does a better job of the thing they just asked for. It means lending equipment to a competitor mid-service when their grinder dies, because a bad cup anywhere in town makes specialty coffee look like a con everywhere in town.

It means when someone opens a cart two miles away, we help them source rather than wait for them to fail.

The Inland Empire is the point

Bringing specialty coffee to the Inland Empire was the founding idea. Not bringing *our* specialty coffee — specialty coffee. The market here is not big enough to fight over and the fight would be the fastest way to keep it small.

Every good shop that opens near us makes the next customer more likely to try the third one. That is not charity. It is the only growth strategy available in a region that has been underserved for decades.

The part that is not sentimental

We are not a co-operative and we are a business. We price our coffee to survive, we compete hard on quality, and we would rather win an account than lose it.

The distinction is narrow but real: we compete on how good the coffee is, and we refuse to compete by making anybody else look bad. One of those grows the category. The other just moves customers around a category that is not growing.

Where the name comes from

Lucky's is named for Tyler's Irish heritage and for his experience as an adopted child. Lucky, in the truest sense of the word — which is to say, aware of how much of it was other people.

That is not a bad frame for a coffee business either.