"Kutzky Market Live!"

for A.H.

Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

- The Cluetrain Manifesto

LIVE from Kutzky Market! 

Thursday, August 27, 2015

KUTZKY MARKET - Kutzky Market opened (softly) for business today - serving coffee until 5pm. To mark the occasion I thought the resident blogger should take up residence. So I have. 

I first heard of this place several months ago. A few months after that I was offered this gig. The offer was unexpected.... 

Three hours later, I get back to this blog. What happened? Conversations. That's what happened.

And that's as far as I got.

Due to circumstances 

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought others who shared the same interests. 

- The Cluetrain Manifesto

Thought on the day Kutzky Market opened the resident blogger would take up residence and blog on site. Bit of a thing to be sure. A contrivance. OK, a gimmick. But there it is. Went to the Market to market...

Ordered a coffee from one of Ann's crew-in-training. Another crew member set about making it, stopping short of her first whipped creaming - Ann stepped in for that.

Considered taking a seat at one of the tables in the coffee shop - tables topped with historical drawings of buildings lost over the years to Mayo Clinic construction.

Opted instead for a nice penny topped table near an outlet over in the Forager pit - apropos since English coffee houses were once called "penny universities".

Set up the machine. Took some photos. Loaded them to the cloud. Pulled one down. Inserted the image. Started to write.

Then it happened. The same thing that has been happening in markets for thousands of years and for hundreds of years in coffee houses. Conversations.

In this case, conversations about the city.

About affordable housing. About plans for affordable housing. About probably needing multiple and alternative plans for affordable housing.

About people concerned about the shadows cast by growth.

About aging in place.

About that building a hockey arena in Mayo Park thing.

About entrepreneurs. About C4. About Tedx. About the places from which change is really coming.

About Kutzky Market.

As I was saying

These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. 

- The Cluetrain Manifesto

Everything about Kutzky Market (and Forager Brewery) is "spoken from the center of the self". There is a vision here to be sure, but do not miss the voices that are speaking because what you see is what they are saying. Even as I am having conversations about the city at the penny topped table, there is a conversation going on all around me that speaks to the city from the parking lot on the west side to the garden on the east side.

As I started to say above before I was pleasantly interrupted, the offer to become the Market's resident blogger was unexpected. Invited to blog, not about Kutzky Market - there is a blog for that - but about anything I wanted. The offer took my breathe away. When it returned, I said yes.

A few weeks later, the first posting appeared. Though it went unnamed, that first posting was about Kutzky Market and especially about those people who were bringing it.

I wrote that not only is the market a human enterprise, it is "fully, thoroughly human." Offering the observation "that in this human enterprise the difference between business-as-usual and entrepreneurial innovation is a joy that knows nor needs no other reason."

A there from here

The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto remind us there was a time when markets were places where buyers and sellers spoke to each other "without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations."

"Market leaders," they write, "were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did....."

There are still markets like these. They are local. Always local. Always. Only local markets can sustain without contrivance the authenticity. Only local markets can be local. The franchise, the chain, the consultant bring with them goods and services, but they offer transactions that serve interests residing elsewhere.

Local markets are destinations to be sure. People go to market. But unlike the marketplace that aspires to be a destination for others from elsewhere, the local market shares only in the destiny of its place for that's where its own destiny resides.

The local market is a there that is from here.

Kutzky Market - go there, it's from here.