There are two diners here in Milford, Delaware: Westside Restaurant (which is on the south end of town) and Milford Diner. They’re both pretty good, but I prefer Westside. It’s the one of the two that meets my exacting standards. Milford Diner doesn’t have feta cheese, for some reason. Too bad, because their coffee is better than Westside.
Both diners serve coffee in a variety of mugs collected from many sources. You get your Legoland mug, your white porcelain food service mug, your Best Mom Ever mug. You get it. The sort of mug variety you’d see on the shelf at a Home Goods or Marshalls or thrift store. Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee!
At a recent breakfast visit, we were blessed to drink out of this mug.
This raised a few questions, of course.
- Does he pronounce his surname to rhyme with “discount” or the like the British nobility?
- If it’s like “discount”, why isn’t he using that in his materials?
- Is this an effective marketing strategy for him? I’d say that the median age of people who eat at these places is like 60, so maybe this old school approach is the right one.
- Where is this guy? I can find no listing for him online. These mugs can’t possibly be that old, can they? Addendum: the name “Bob Viscount” is much more common than I would have assumed. Even a search for “Bob Viscount Delaware” yields many incorrect hits.
- Is he “Bob” to his friends and “Robert” to everyone else?
- How do we get mugs with our faces in the restaurants?
That last question is obviously the most important one. Over our eggs and toast, we started looking, thinking that it should be relatively easy and inexpensive to make this joke real. Bob here has mugs with his face in at least two restaurants in town, after all.
We were wrong. Vistaprint has custom mugs starting at $10.49, as of the writing of this post. That’s fine for a single mug. No problem. But if you really wanted to do this correctly—and I mean, like, really do it correctly—you’d need to saturate the environment with mugs. Milford is a small town and there are only two restaurants I know about with the Bob mugs, but they both serve a ton of coffee. You’d need a lot of mugs. What, like, 50? 100? You’re looking at $449.62 for the 50 pack and $899.25 for the 100 pack. Fortunately the shipping is free.
That feels like too much for an, admittedly, really funny joke. Stick that one in the bin of hilarious ideas to do when we win the lottery. Which we never play. There are some cheaper options out there, but not cheaper enough.
I am not even sure what the mug would look like. It would definitely feature our faces, but it would have to be a new photograph tailored specifically for coffee mug format. None of this half-assed-reusing-existing-assets stuff. If we’re going to spend $900 on a set of 100 custom mugs to spread throughout town for no other reason than because we think it’s funny, we’re going create a new image. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.