
I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life. - peter123
http://www.slate.com/id/2132576
======
pj
Funny how the last line of the article says,

 _Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef
Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most
dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for
love."_

This in spite of recent conversations here discussing "doing what you love":
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449295>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449457>

Why didn't doing it for love work for the author? I suppose if I were to
answer the question myself, I'd say either a) they didn't love it _enough_. or
b) They did some bad math.

Why not just sell the crossiants for $3? Why not sell the cold house coffee
for $3 instead of $1? Raise the price, let your customers keep you alive. If
they like what you have to offer, they will.

If their dream was to open a coffee shop, why /not/ work there full time? Why
not make it work? Other coffee shops _have_ figured out the formula and _do_
survive. Maybe their owners loved it more?

Every business struggles in the beginning.

Do /not/ give up. Keep going. If your formula isn't working, tweak it. Don't
close up shop. That's what you _don't_ do if you love what you do. You don't
give up on something you love. You can't.

~~~
fallentimes
I think he loved the idea of owning a coffee shop, not actually doing it.

~~~
blackguardx
As I sit in my cubicle day in and day out practically forcing myself to do
work that I don't really care about, I often wonder if I merely love the idea
of being an engineer rather than the actual practice of it.

~~~
kentosi
Yeah. It's kinda sad when you have a romantic idea of something, but reality
paints a totally different picture.

I'm learning a new language at the moment. The romantic idea I had in my head
was being able to speak it fluently with friends from that culture, read
books, etc. The reality is that learning a language is difficult and and takes
a lot of effort and patience.

Thankfully, I love studying it. But then if I didn't and then gave up I'd
still be painting that romantic image in my head thinking i "shoulda, coulda,
woulda..".

I kinda forgot where I was going with this... sorry :-(

~~~
endtime
With languages, my experience has usually been that it's easy and gratifying
at first. Then it gets tough and demoralizing. And then you sort of break
through that wall and it becomes quite gratifying again. So hang in there. :)

Oh, and to get past the level where you can hold a simple conversation I have
found immersion necessary. My Hebrew improved as much in a month in Israel
this past summer as it had in the previous year.

~~~
jimbokun
"I have found immersion necessary."

This is the only practical way to learn a language. There is an oft repeated
cliche about playing quarterback in the NFL, that no matter how much you
practice or try to simulate game conditions, the speed and chaos of actual
game conditions is something you can't understand, really, until you
experience it.

Well, learning a foreign language does not involve 300 pound men coming at you
at high velocity, but the real experience of trying to communicate something
you really want to say to a real human being is a very different experience
than learning words or even grammar structure from a book, audio, video, or
lecture. Even interacting with classmates is somewhat contrived, because you
are probably trying to say something your teacher prepared for you, instead of
getting own ideas across.

So, to summarize: learning a language with out immersion (or something close
to it) will likely never amount to anything more than an academic experience.

~~~
endtime
Well, most of what you say is true, but doesn't require immersion. For
example, I have Israeli friends here in the States, and I keep in touch with a
couple cousins in Israel. So it's possible for me to have real conversations
(as opposed to contrived conversations with classmates or workbook exercises
etc.) without actually going to Israel.

I found immersion useful because when you hear a language all day, every day,
it seems to seep into your subconscious. Also, I think that language learning
is a function of density rather than just volume, so to speak. That is to say,
spending ten hours speaking a language every day for a month is more effective
than speaking it for half an hour a day for 600 days.

------
lallysingh
Maybe I'll do this later, but I always wanted to open up a hacker's place. I'd
call it the Bit Bucket.

Part bookstore (~50 titles, classics only - W. Richard Stevens, etc.), part
coffee shop, part decent hardware shop (FPGAs, GPGPU, blade servers, and half
& full-height rackmounts you can convince your S.O. to let you put in the
basement), and bar.

Also, a good selection of little parts that you'd normally have to ebay, a
little selection of RAM, heat sinks, PCI cover plates, etc. I'd put it in a
display where you'd normally see the baked goods.

I'd have no illusions of being profitable at this, but it'll give me something
to do when I retire :-)

~~~
russell
Sounds like a smaller version of the first Fry's Electronics:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fry%27s_Electronics> They did OK.

~~~
brk
Just be wary of employees that have a suite named after them at a Vegas hotel.

~~~
sadiq
Is that a general reference or something specific to frys?

Could you elaborate more?

~~~
bmelton
From the linked wiki:

"In 2008, Fry's vice president of merchandising and operations, Ausuf Umar
Siddiqui, was charged by federal prosecutors in an illegal kick back scheme
involving Fry's vendors. The alleged scheme was designed to defraud the
company in order to cover Siddiqui's gambling expenses"

------
TooMuchNick
This also answers my longest-standing question about cafes: Why are there so
few fun ones?

San Francisco's Valencia Street (with its immediate offshoots) supports
hundreds of interesting businesses. Many of them are cafes. Only two of those
cafes are any good: Ritual Roasters, and Four Barrel. Four Barrel was founded
last year by a disgruntled co-founder of Ritual.

While the rest of Valencia's cafes are grimy, poorly lit, deathly quiet, or
all of the above, RR and FB are sunny, friendly, and _loud_. That noise is all
the foot traffic (and some David Bowie). The people sitting in Ritual for five
hours on a laptop aren't paying the (staggeringly high) rent. It's the
constant in-and-out of to-go cups. Mercifully, Four Barrel has no wifi and
thus a more talkative, flowing crowd.

Ironically, because RR and FB have coffee that makes people come and go
quickly, they can afford to make a pleasant space for people who stick around.
Their solution to cafe economics was to make their own high-markup product.

Of course there are other solutions. Cafe du Soleil in the Lower Haight offers
an extensive sandwich menu and gets its baked goods as part of a chain of
boutique cafes and restaurants called the Bay Bread Group, which also sells
bread to bigger clients like the Ritz Carlton. For all I know, Soleil is
riding on the profits of the Bay Bread Group as an indulgent loss leader.

But I suppose there's a lesson there for any startup with a boutique aspect:
Make your own supplies, and you might have a business plan to support your
dream. In a way, wasn't that the model for Reddit and Justin.tv?

~~~
silencio
Honestly I think it's a location thing. Valencia Street is a place where
interesting businesses would exist..I've always been intrigued at the kind of
businesses I see when I visit friends in the area.

From personal experience (I've been in the market for coffee shop businesses
of all types in Los Angeles for a couple years - from family owned tiny mom
and pop stores to franchises), it's all about the location unless you have a
lot of hype and if you have both even better. Anyone can start a coffee shop
and stock their display cases with local/well known bakeries and coffee
providers, but you need all kinds of customers (both the people who occupy a
table with only a $1 cup of coffee all day long and the people who rush in and
out, both something you can't get if you are badly-situated) and not just a
little something extra. The latter is typically a way to get people to come to
your store rather than another close by, or a little perk for your customers
so they'll return later.

Plus, there's always Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Peet's to deal with...
_sigh_.

~~~
TooMuchNick
But like I said, there are plenty of awful cafes on Valencia. I guess I
conflated financial success and coolness: Mission Creek, one block down
Valencia from Ritual, seems to get along just fine but it's a terribly dull
place to go. The coffee there is just like anyone else's; the food is
mediocre; the atmosphere is deathly silent. They've taken prime real estate
and turned it into an office for people with no office -- and not a fun one.
It's literally no more social than sitting in your living room, and the coffee
and food are on par with what you could make for yourself. And the entire city
is full of these decrepit little places that can only afford to offer
mediocrity, because better food wouldn't necessarily bring in profits, and
cranking up the music might drive away the customers who buy the most product.
In the midst of all these mediocrity machines, Ritual and Four Barrel stand
out because of what they've done with the same opportunities.

Okay, they do have one big real estate advantage: they bought giant spaces
with room for a roaster. But is there any other way a cafe could serve
something special that still attracts the high-profit foot traffic that turns
Ritual and Four Barrel into community centers? I'd like to hope so.

------
derefr
I'm a writer. I go to coffee shops, sit there, and drink as little coffee as
possible, staring into my little book while taking up a table and spraying a
Cone of Introverted Quiet everywhere I turn. I am the bane of the regular
coffee shop. But what if there were a shop that tailored their business model
to me?

Instead of charging for food or drink, and then letting you have the space for
free, how about switching the two? Charge _for the table_ by the hour (or with
a monthly subscription), and then have free little snacks and drinks to go
along with the seat. Limit customers to those with a creative/insightful
streak (yes, get resumes), and disallow anyone from sitting alone or ignoring
the people next to them for more than ten minutes. Perhaps even invite
famously loquacious people to hang out there (in the exact same way as the
regular patrons do.) Thus is born a sort of "idea club"--like TED, but every
day, and peer-to-peer instead of multicast.

On the same vein, don't buy newspapers (or anything else topical) for reading
material; buy hardcover books, fiction and non-. Require that people read them
out loud if they're reading (thus, basically, giving a reading of the book to
whoever's nearby.) Don't have a wi-fi connection; _do_ have a "room librarian"
that will look up the answers to questions on a hard line, and is ready to
explain the answers in detail. And so on.

~~~
silencio
Writing this for the second time this week on HN...I should just copy and
paste ;)

Coffee shops: expensive rent for owner because of prime retail location,
foodservice business (therefore more requirements with less space to work
with).

Workspace/office rental: not so expensive rent for owner since it can be
located anywhere there is commercial real estate, is not a foodservice
business (less restrictions, more space). Bonus: not as much noise and more
actual office space with wifi and ethernet and places to plug in. Additional
bonus for you: some of these workspaces will have newspapers and other reading
material for you to check out without having to buy.

Both: offer tables and coffee and food for people who want to sit down and
chill.

What a lot of people SHOULD be doing is going to a workspace (i.e. in los
angeles there's theOffice and Blankspaces off the top of my head) and actually
paying per table or workspace by the hour/day instead of sitting at a coffee
shop where that per table pricing model is completely infeasible because of
what a coffee shop inherently _is_. Sadly demand for them isn't as high as I
would have thought, but the problem has been approached before in a way that
doesn't bankrupt the owner (aka a coffee shop with an hourly per-table/seat
charge).

~~~
sgibat
What about an automated coffee shop? A machine that remakes coffee when it
gets low with a reserve of beans it grinds automatically, dispensed in
different sizes by coin or bill. Have a machine on the inside and on the
outside, facing the street. So you can have your romantic atmosphere and make
a lot of money selling coffee quickly to people on the go for the mere cost of
a machine.

~~~
silencio
But there is only so much space for romantic atmosphere inside a shop (the
main issue, really), and existing automated coffee machines are..limited (then
again, most people would probably just get ordinary coffee). On the other
hand, that sounds like an interesting thing to hack together for home if only
I wasn't in love with my french press :)

Also when a similar topic came up last week, there was mention of charging a
fee (i.e. $20/day) for use of the table, wifi and a bottomless cup of coffee.

It would be interesting to see both of these implemented in an actual coffee
shop, cause they're not necessarily something I have seen and are certainly
one way to approach the problem.

------
gcv
"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches
twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege
costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service,
that would turn it into work and then they would resign." --- Mark Twain

------
mschwar99
As someone who opened a similar business I thought that the ratios that were
listed as rules of thumb were failry on target with my experience, but the
statement "If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close" was crazy.

1.) Your potential customers are creatures of habit and it takes time to
change their traffic patterns. Your grand opening is your biggest splash and a
key time to get attention, but getting return customers is a struggle to
reshape their patterns.

2.) A new business should ideally be properly capitalized to slug out way more
than a month. Not only does it take time to get people in the door but it
takes you and your staff more than a month to adjust to the unexpected, get
your act together, and polish your product.

If your new business is going to be your only stream of income you need
capital available before going in to stretch more than a month. This piece of
planning is every bit as important as the name on your shingle.

Opening a new and not yet profitable business does suck up your whole life,
but if you succeed that doesn't have to last forever. Its after this initial
"slugging it out" time period that you can reclaim your life.

------
acangiano
I think these people lacked business sense.

You are not selling coffee, you are selling an experience. Most people go to
Starbucks for the experience they have there, the illusion of being refined
members of society who can afford it. To feel cool among their peers. The
coffee is an admission price. People with a laptop bothering you? How about
providing a wi-fi service and charging for it instead?

To distinguish yourself you want to have outrageous quality and markups. You
want to target upper middle class people who don't mind spending $10 for a
large cup of coffee and a couple of baked goods.

Make your environment as nice as possible. Make the quality of your coffee as
good as it can be. Be remarkable. Be well known for having the best coffee in
your city, state, or even America. Make people want to drive 20 miles just to
get there.

Just opening another unremarkable little coffee shop doesn't make much sense.
Opening the "Fat Duck" of coffee shops does.

~~~
gaius
People go to Starbucks because once you've learnt Starbuckish you can order
your coffee exactly how you like it anywhere. They're selling ubiquity. It's
the same business as Subway, you can get your "unique" thing wherever you are.
Brands that (successfully) go for "cool" you see people wearing their logo on
their clothing and accessories and I don't recall seeing anyone who wasn't
staff ever sporting a Starbucks logo.

My regular Starbucks, where they know me and start making my drink as soon as
I walk in, I go to because it's on my way home from work and it's open 24
hours. And Starbucks knew that there was this kind of consumer and that's why
they're there. That's what they're selling.

------
socialtistics
It is always easier to armchair quarterback people's stories like this, but I
do see two problems that immediately stuck out at me.

Success in business centers around execution and if you do not execute
effectively you are bound to fail. In the first paragraph the guy says "The
one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception
because it was too precious and too offbeat?" As a business owner if my
customers were telling me I was "doomed" I would be working to change that
perception. If a potential long-term customer sees your business as doomed
from the start, he or she is probably going to resist going to your business
by instinct. This can be especially true in the restaurant business and even
more so with coffee shops. People are creatures of habit and tend to go places
they like and enjoy. If you want people to come to your coffee shop it is
going to take time (more than a month). If they do stop in and feel as if your
business is doomed then what incentive do they have to come back again?

The second problem I see here is this guy had a dream and in that dream there
was a part where he would open the shop and there would be immediate success.
Not success earned by time and through customer loyalty. He expected the
success of opening the doors and having people rushing in. Starting a new
business takes time and, as others have said, a savings available to handle
the rough times and starting period. This is especially so with restaurants
and probably more so with coffee houses. Expenses are going to be high between
rent, payroll, and food expenses. If you can't afford to handle these without
a single customer walking in the door for a month or two your chances of
success are instantly diminished.

The final problem I see is this guy was not open to changing his pricing. His
solution was to go with the cheaper product rather than raise his prices. It
is a known fact that people will pay more for a better product, but they
aren't going to pay the same for a cheaper product. I surely wouldn't buy a
Kia at a BMW price.

While I feel sorry for this guy and at the same time give him credit for
trying, I do not feel as if he put enough thought into the business, gave it
enough time, and surely was not familiar with the management side of running a
restaurant. Sadly he learned the hard way and now his life is destroyed.

------
dmix
A new reference article for those who want to know the difference between a
startup and a small business?

~~~
JacobAldridge
I'm wondering what you see the difference as? For me, every start-up is a
small business (with various size visions), and every small business is a
start-up.

Is it the size of the vision? (ie, a boutique cafe will only ever be small,
while a start-up might be valued at $15B) Or is it the difference between
leveraging effort rather than leveraging scalable code?

~~~
emmett
I was talking to Justin recently, and he gave the most succinct definition
I've heard: A startup is a business aiming for a liquidity event.

Edit: Reading the responses to this, people clearly got the wrong idea. A
liquidity event != early acquisition. But every successful startup nonetheless
hits liquidity: acquisition, IPO, or substantial dividend payment to its
shareholders. And that's a distinction between a successful startup and a
successful small business, which are not intended to achieve liquidity.

~~~
Agathos
That's a popular one, but I find it so depressing. Here you've quit your job
and thrown yourself into something you believe in, and from the first day
you're thinking about how you'll unload it?

~~~
gravitycop
I think the idea of startupism, or startup mentality, is that one believes
most of all in _starting_ things - kicking off great ideas - rather than being
a shopkeeper. There are _other_ people who like being shopkeepers. Let _them_
run it after you've created and tamed it for them, so you can be free to kick
off other great ideas - or to help new entrepreneurs do it.

------
awt
I tried to open a neigborhood grociery store. It didn't destroy my life, but I
did lose a lot of respect for the local city officials. Imagine if you wanted
to start a website, but you couldn't work from your home on it because your
home didn't have an ADA compliant restroom.

------
stuntgoat
Coffee shops fail because of poor management and/or poor quality. 4Barrel and
Ritual succeed because they are quality focused. If you are a coffee shop-
roast and brew the best coffee possible; this takes love, work, and an
interest in coffee. Owners of successful coffee shops like the ones mentioned
try to roast and brew the best coffee that they can. The author must not have
set themselves apart from other coffee businesses in terms of quality; either
that, or poor management. If you have quality and capable management it would
be hard to fail. Defining coffee quality is beyond the scope of this site-
methinks. ( basically, it is buying great green coffees, roasting them very
well( don't burn them!), brewing them as best as you can( French Press or
something without paper( and often (every 30-45 minutes))), having staff that
care about keeping the quality standards ( good luck with that one!!), and
thinking: about how to have better quality and be more efficient). Actually,
it is fairly easy.

------
ssharp
The author notes that he did not do this out of wanting to own a business.
While I believe that, I also believe that many folks who start businesses do
so out of the romantic idea of owning your own business. They may not love the
business but they love the idea of owning the business. I think this generally
happens with people who are nearing retirement and are looking for something
to do when they are done with their 9-5.

It's almost ALWAYS a bad idea. One of the common reasons for their efforts is
that they want to leave something behind...either in their name or a business
that can be passed on to their children. Why burden YOURSELF with the hassles
of a business in your retirement years let alone make your children feel like
they have to take over when you can no longer work?

If there's one thing I'd like my parents to do in their retirement, it's
nothing. Enjoy life. Relax. Travel. Play golf. Show me see how enjoyable my
retirement years can be.

------
callmeed
I'm glad he quotes Bourdain. _Kitchen Confidential_ is a great book and
convinced me never to open a restaurant-even though cooking is my 3rd passion
(behind hacking and photography)

------
ojbyrne
Kind of old. I enjoyed the article (and realized that coffee shop == lifestyle
business) when I first read it back in 2005.

------
rms
First time a story is #1 on HN and reddit at the same time?

------
sgman
"The marriage has been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy." Probably the best
quote I've heard in a while.

------
wallflower
My friend and I would probably open an independent bookstore if we had no
cares about making money.

------
chadmalik
One thing that annoys me about coffee shops is how unfriendly people are.
Mostly peering into laptops. I'd like to go to a coffee shop where people go
explicitly to engage in interesting/random conversation with strangers.

~~~
blhack
Some of the best conversations I've ever had with people at coffee shops have
started because of laptops.

"Whoa, is that one of those XO laptops? Do you like it? Can I try?"

------
TweedHeads
Forget romance, go for the money.

Love what you do, but love money much more.

