My “Blend” Retail Marketing Summer Class (Part 2)
July 10, 2019
Welcome back to the Part 2 of my Retail Marketing summer class blog!
As I mentioned in the Part 1 blog, this online summer class has two in-person class meetings at a local coffee shop called Helix near our Lake Shore Campus. And yesterday, we had our first “coffee shop class” together!
The coffee shop just opened in May 2019, and many things are still in developing like store layout and menu, etc. I really like all the design and small detail in the shop, but have not tried their coffee yet (but will try soon ha-ha). I am personally not a huge fan of studying in a coffee shop because of background noise. And, I am happy our class came in after their business hours so that there was only the smell of coffee around the shop! We sat down with the two founders of Helix, and learned about their mission and purpose of opening this coffee shop. Their vision is to create a network of social enterprises that employ youth and reinvest in the communities. I have never seen a mission driven coffee shop built for helping youth on their career path and skill sets before. Also, both of the founders are Loyola Alumni, and one of them is also the co-founders of Loyola Limits!
I am not sure if it was the coffee shop environment or the excitement of meeting each other in person, but three hours of the in-person class went by much faster than our online version in my opinion. I think it is great to meet with my classmates in person and know more about each other, because we will have group projects working together in the next few weeks.
There are so much more interesting and new ideas in this class. For example, this is a writing intensive class, but we are not writing anything like a research paper or any normal college paper. We are writing podcast scripts for our final marketing audits project! To be honest, I did not even know there are scripts for podcasts at first. I though people just free-talk and chat on their podcasts. By the way, are you a Trader Joe’s fan? Do you know there is a podcast talking about everything about Trader Joe’s called Inside Trader Joe’s? Dr. Stacy is a huge fan of Trader Joe’s, and this podcast is actually one of the “textbooks” we will learn from. (If you have not read the Part 1 blog yet, we don’t have any paper/online textbook for this class. Instead, we listen to podcasts!)
Please make a comment if you want to know more about summer class experience at Loyola or anything else! I am happy to answer and write about! Stay tuned!