Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Selling Coal to Newcastle

It was a dark windy Monday night. Mike was attending a business meeting as usual. He was a manager of a popular upscale bar/restaurant in Washington DC. Tonight's topic of discussion was adding new beer to the menu. There were suggestions of both high end and low end beers. Mike was in his late 40's and had been drinking since he was 18 a few years before the countries legal drinking age. But it made him smart to his trade. He knew beer as if it were the front of his hand. He knew all 150 flavors of beer on the companies menu so well that he could upon request recite the primary ingredients, the flavor, who distributed it, and where it was brewed. He was also opposed to adding new beers to the menu. His primary argument was that there were so many different types of beer on the bars menu already that adding one or two variations would produce no further income and would increase expenses. He claimed that only adding a few beers would be similar to trying to sell coal to Newcastle.
Upon suggestion of the company reworking the menu to try and fit the new varieties in he proclaimed that this would be to violent a change. The bar was an established bar and had been around for 15 years, which was a long time in an industry that was always changing. He was certain that reworking the menu would alienate the core group of customers that the bar had established. This would be devastating given the audience the bar catered to, celebrities of every popular category.
Despite the pleas from other members of his company Mike would simply not hear of altering the menu. There were arguments that Mike had lost touch with the scene and was to stuck in his ways to continue leading the company. Knowing that he had led the company into over a million dollars in profit during his tenure there, which consisted of only five short years. He called the companies bluff and told them that if they wanted to alter the menu then they would have to relieve him of his duties as manager. He would not change a strong business unless he saw a reason to and at the moment he saw no reason to.

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