Independent Coffee Shops

Most won’t remember cafes as they used to be: unglamorous places to gather for tea, thin ham sandwiches and the occasional fancy coffee all for prices cheap enough to keep the kids out of trouble.

Then came the tepid, omnipresent, excruciatingly dull and soulless 'coffee shop' chains that are devouring and homogenising our high streets. Independent coffee shops, those not (yet?) part of an international conglomerate have, though, been thriving. But how independent are they, really? Like the pierced and tattooed at Reading Festival, when you've seen enough of them their uniqueness starts to fade.

These coffee shops are now at the tipping point of becoming cliches of themselves and so any wise owner could do worse than heed the following observations and advice. After watching in silence for many years, after an unenvious and extremely troubling quarter of an hour with one’s finger stuck in a cup handle clearly designed never to be held, I’m breaking my silence.

Name

You’re nothing without an identity and nothing shows it more clearly than the sign above the door (for those that have one—true independence is surely the absence of one: if you don’t know, you’re not supposed to).

Coffee shop nomenclatures follow one of three cliches. First, take a foreign sounding name, preferably Scandinavian, and add an animal. The more mysterious the better: Köfi + Marmot, Skouret & Wolernine, Capybara Norski etc.

Second, use the name of the establishment you forced to shut down so you can sell £5 milkshakes but appear to be just part of the evolving community: Andy’s Nuts and Bolts, Richards, Morgan and Co., The Cancer Trust etc.

Finally, perhaps the safest bet is to pick an abstract noun (better still, add some punctuation) to which you never make any reference or explanation: Enui, @Longing, Weltschmerz! etc.

Pricing

The aim of an independent coffee shop is no different to Starbucks: maximise profits. The difference, though, is to create the illusion of trying not to care about money whilst hiding the fact you also charge absurdly high prices.

The shrewd owner must create the aura of their business having sprung organically from self-sustaining communities who care about its members enough to selflessly provide them with a place to talk about their allotments. You need a local noticeboard and you must train your minimum wage staff to look embarrassed when they ask you to pay.

To pull this off a few tricks are needed. It helps not to have a menu. One is less shocked by a price they’ve never seen—ask the Ritz. If you must, use a typeface so small no one under the age of 30 can read it, or price it as confusingly as possible such as using the pounds, shillings and pence equivalents or serve drinks in incomparable byzantine volumes such as a sextarius or kotyle.

Another tried and tested method is the hidden mark-up. Push this to its extreme. The menu price and the price one pays are only connected in the consciousness by convention. There is no reason they need remain so. Tactics deployed here include adding a 10% “community payment” (this meaningless charge can take other forms, the aim is to sound worthy, charitable and socially horrific to be seen to question—examples spotted include “cancer charge”, “Tony’s Final Fund” and “Exclusivity Payment”, giving credit repayable monthly or creating the illusion of exclusivity with handcrafted beverages that will only ever be made once.

Vibrations

The look and feel of the independent coffee shop is vital to draw people in just long enough to extract as much money from them as possible but not too interesting such that they will not tire, to make room for the next gullible customer. This requires mastering a multivariate optimisation problem balancing shock, the familiar, quirk, and even the calculated use of partnerships.

You need to draw people in. Shock is a well-used tactic, often lowkey with hints of amusement, confusion or juxtaposition. The filled workmen’s skip where you’d expect to queue, unexplained pictures of yachts and horses or an un-claimed corpse (bravo, Hoxton).

For example, let there be chairs if you must but what if not having tables is what makes the place so achingly hip? Sure, you may need walls, but a roof? I’ve seen cups become children’s beakers, a perpetual oompah band instead of cutlery and dwarf misuse.

Finally, birds of a feather flock together so don't be surprised by the trend of coffee shops teaming up non sequitur "independent" services. Tired already of the coffee-shop-florist and coffee-bike-shops we're now seeing coffee-dry-cleaners, barista-barristers and the first cafe-undertakers.

I’ve predicted where this will end: a super agglomeration where the entire high street coalesces into the retail equivalent of the undying post-nuclear cockroaches of coffee-shop-estate agent-hairdressers.