Coffee Break’s Troost stickers are all the rage

If you’ve driven down Troost Avenue, oh, ever, you might have found yourself behind a vehicle sporting one of these blunt, black-and-white bumper stickers. They’re the creation of Mark Holmes, the 41-year-old owner of Coffee Break, the quirky cafe that serves Rockhurst University and University of Missouri Kansas City students on the corner of 54th and
Troost.

Holmes sells the stickers for $1 apiece. His first 300 went pretty fast. After donating the $300 in proceeds to Durwin Rice’s Tulips on Troost efforts, Holmes broke even. Making money wasn’t the point. The stickers are advertising, sure, but more than that, Holmes is using them to try to drive away the negative connotations associated with Troost Avenue.

“It’s all in how you interpret it,” he says of the design. The street’s name is big, bold and ambiguous. “Coffee Break” is on there, too, in such small letters across the bottom left that motorists never see it. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” Holmes says. “That’s why it doesn’t say something like, Troost is where you need to be.”

The message is getting out, obviously, because Holmes’ stickers are gone. His next batch of 1,000, still $1 each, should arrive in a few weeks. He sells t-shirts of the design too.