It's a mug's game

All steamed up: Feuding brothers Alistair, Alan and Angus, who run the lucrative AMT chain of coffee outlets across the UK

Victor Lewis-Smith|Evening Standard

5 April 2012

You may think that we columnar journalists enjoy an easy and lucrative lifestyle, but you'd be wrong, and I'm constantly forced to think up new ways of augmenting my meagre stipend.

As well as renting out my body in the environs of King's Cross station, I've recently been peddling my patent Braille speedometer, but sales fell sharply after the first couple of deaths, and I urgently need to find a more reliable method of making a little extra pin money (because pin-collecting is a surprisingly expensive hobby).

Fortunately, I've come up with the brilliant idea of marketing a new type of beverage under the brand name Marxist Tea, and although it's really just bog-standard PG Tips and Brook Bond, I'm sure it'll sell to die-hard communists, once I've reminded them of Karl's famous decree that "all proper tea is theft".

And Karl was right, because the cost of proper tea like Darjeeling in Fortnum and Mason these days is nothing less than daylight robbery.

However, according to last night's edition of I'll Show Them Who's Boss (BBC2), the big money in hot drinks lies not in tea but in coffee. The cappuccino business may seem to be mostly froth, but the three brothers who run the AMT chain had a turnover of £11 million last year, amassed from their 37 outlets at train stations and airports across the UK.

Personally, I've always thought that the coffee on sale at railway stations generally tastes like mud (I suppose that's why the staff always tell you "it was ground this morning"), but Alistair, Alan, and Angus were making a small fortune by flogging pricy Javan and Kenyan blends, even though they were consumed by sibling rivalry, and could not even decide on what colour the mugs should be without repeatedly vetoing each other's suggestions.

Indeed, the fact that they were making such a healthy profit, in spite of their business being a rudderless ship, suggested to me that the real coffee mugs are the thousands of customers who queue up each day to buy the overpriced stuff.

The recent death of their father had allowed the brothers' feuding to get worse, so when City boss Gerry Robinson offered to advise them on strategy, they willingly turned to him for some quasiparental guidance.

The former head of Granada clearly possesses the best qualities of Sir John Harvey Jones and Professor Anthony Clare, and he quickly decided that what was leaving a funny taste in everyone's mouth wasn't the coffee, but the incessant internecine strife.

Alistair (the youngest) regarded himself as the natural leader, a role that Angus (the eldest) also coveted, while the middle brother, Alan, swung like a nervous pendulum between the two, and Robinson swiftly condemned this constant antagonism as "a very bad starting point".

Listening to them bickering over the simple matter of how to testmarket some new lines of muffins and flapjacks ("don't waffle", "it'll be a piece of cake"), it was obvious that their entire business strategy was decidedly half-baked.

The discussions were stressful but absorbing, so it's a pity that some superfluous editing had overdramatised the tension to an almost comedic level. Playing spaghetti-Western music was patronising (the brothers were half-Mexican), while a 45-minute delay before a meeting was cut so it looked like a major catastrophe, and we were repeatedly treated to what is rapidly becoming the most overused televisual cliché of 2003, as the presenter was filmed watching DVD clips on his laptop.

But those were minor lapses in an otherwise absorbing documentary, which culminated in Robinson finally getting the three squabbling brothers to agree on something.

They all agreed that they didn't want his advice any more, and said so in terms so forceful that, had they been paying for his expertise, I suspect they'd have told him to do what a goose can do, a duck can't do, and the average business consultant should do. That's right. Stick his bill up his arse.

There are at least a dozen nationwide companies selling expensive, flavoured hot water to the public, and without a single clear-headed boss in control, it's hard to see how AMT can stay ahead of the competition for long. At the end, Robinson simply shrugged and moved on, but the trio's wilfully self-destructive behaviour made me want to Gaggia, and Freud would surely have had a field day, observing the way that the emotional baggage of the family was obstructing the smooth running of the business at every turn.

Jean-Paul Sartre would have been interested too, I'm sure, because this was the beverage that inspired him to write his seminal work, Being and Nothingness, after he'd sat down in a cafe on the rive gauche one afternoon, and asked a waitress for a cup of coffee with no cream.