Pascale Hall knows a little something about Blue Chips and IPOs, but mostly she knows about “Closely Held Café Olés” and “Wall St. Cappuccinos.” Hall is the owner of Standard & Pours Coffee and Stocks—a small coffee shop in the basement of South Side on Lamar where locals go for drinks, wireless Internet access, and free copies of the Wall Street Journal. In keeping with the theme, ticker symbols of the stocks Hall sold to start the shop are stenciled in large letters across the concrete floor.
But despite the money motif, no one is coming to Hall for stock advice. Most of the coffee-drinking customers think her homage to trading is clever, and no one has ever confused the small shop with Standard & Poor’s, the mammoth corporation behind the S&P 500. A few of Hall’s customers have even asked her to explain the name. “If anything, I’m promoting them,” she says.
Standard & Poor’s doesn’t see it that way. A year and a half after Hall opened the shop in March 2003, she received a letter from the credit rating providers requesting that she surrender her web site, standardandpours.com, because its domain name was too similar to their own (standardandpoors.com). Hall refused, but put a disclaimer on her site warning visitors that she is not affiliated with the company.
In February 2005, Hall received another letter asking her to remove the site, but no legal action has been taken against her so far. “They thought we’d go out of business,” Hall says. Instead, her business has grown: A second shop will open soon at Akard and Pacific, and a group of NBA players want to invest in several more, renewing Standard & Poor’s efforts to prevent Hall from toying with their trademark. She received a third letter this spring.
“They want me to change my name, but I don’t want to,” Hall says. “We don’t really advertise. It’s the name people recognize.”
For Standard & Poor’s, that’s the problem.
