[I don’t give a damn about artisanal toast, but the story ends up really being about a pretty amazing person. -egg]<\/p>\n
At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. \u201cI did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,\u201d she said. \u201cI wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The smallness of her cafe\u0301s is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it\u2019s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. \u201cNo one can be mad at toast,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Carrelli\u2019s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a cafe\u0301, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism\u2014a specialized tool\u2014designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.<\/p>\n