It's the 21st century now, and we're excited to begin using some of the new tools at our disposal to reach out to you and make this a richer relationship. Beyond being a business, Kavarna—like all good coffeehouses—is a medium of communication. We serve food and drink, but we're also a place where you can come and find out a few things that are happening in the community. This eNewsletter and also our new website reflect our desire to extend this function past our door and to be a more effective source for community information.

The most wonderful part of this is that the communication can go in both directions. Please let us know if you're planning an event, a concert, or anything else that may be of interest to your fellow Kavarna customers. We'll post it on the website, just as we've always posted flyers in the store. We feel that our customers are among the most interesting people living in the Green Bay area, and we're very happy that we can use these technologies to help you get to know each other as well as we've gotten to know you.

And, of course, we'll also be letting you know what we're doing and sharing ideas.

—Linda and Alex Galt

Kavarna opened its doors on November 5th, 1999. On that day, the odds were against it. The fact is that most restaurants and coffeeshops fail; especially if they don't serve meat. Well, as you know, we're still around and very pleased to be celebrating our 6th anniversary. Here's what we came up with:

The First Annual Coffee Bean Guessing Contest: That's right, guess how many beans are in the coffee carafe, write your guess (educated or otherwise) on a slip of paper, and the six closest guessers will win one of these six prizes:

• Grand Prize: an entire year of free brewed coffee or tea
• First Prize: a gift certificate for lunch or dinner for you and a friend
• Second Prize: a Kavarna T-shirt
• Third Prize: a Kavarna Mug
• Fourth Prize: one dozen of Kavarna's addictive Chocolate Chunk Cookies
• Fifth Prize: one pound of Kavarna Roast coffee

The coffee carafe filled with coffee beans will be put out on the counter this Sunday at 11am. You'll have until Friday at 10pm to make your guess. Good luck!

Plus, keep an eye on kavarna.com all next week for anecdotes, historical information, and other celebratory tidbits.

Not only have we redesigned our website, we've reconceptualized it to make it more relevant. We'll be adding new posts every day or two, whenever we have something new to share. Whether it's a community event, something going on at Kavarna, or just something we found interesting and wanted to pass along.

All of the information on the site has been updated, especially the menu. We've even set it up so that we can display up to the minute information on our weekly soups and specials.

We're particularly excited about our two RSS feeds: the Kavarna News feed and the Soup and Special feed. If you're not familiar with RSS, it's a fairly new technology that allows you to subscribe to a source of information. Take our Soup and Specials feed, for example:

• 1.) Download a RSS reader. Many of these are available for free.
• 2.) Subscribe to Kavarna's Soup and Specials feed
• 3.) Every time we have a new soup or special, we'll put it out on the feed and you'll be automatically informed.

We're not the only ones using RSS; it's a wonderful way to receive news and information from thousands of different sources. More information on RSS and how to use it is available here.

Robert Greenwald, the documentary filmmaker who made "Outfoxed" and several other films, has recently released a film about Wal-Mart called, appropriately, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." Evidently, he managed to get interviews with several former executives and to tour some of the factories where Wal-Mart produces its goods.

Greenwald has a very 21st century distribution model: he sells dvds of his films very cheaply and encourages people and organizations to hold free screenings. For this film, over 6000 screenings have been organized during the week of November 13th. We were happy to see that two have already been scheduled in Green Bay. If you're interested, the times and locations are listed at walmartmovie.com, there's more info on the movie there as well. They encourage you to RVSP.

We understand that you may not want to receive eNewsletters from Kavarna; we're generally against unsolicited emails too. We hope that you find that this is more than just spam, we really believe that this will be a wonderful thing. However, if you'd like to be removed from our e-mail list, or if there's a more appropriate address that we should be using, please write to us at info@kavarna.com, and let us know.

A Note on Privacy: We will not share your e-mail with anyone for any reason.

Why am I on on this list?: For awhile we had a newsletter sign-up sheet on the counter; but most likely you put your business card in the large cappuccino cup.