Demise of a Coffee Shop

A January 2021 Remote Review

It is unclear who said it first, but geographers and others know that the value of a property -- and the potential of a business -- depends on three factors: location, location location.

Detail from GeoCafes Map

This would suggest great things for The Kitchen Café, which opened in 2017 in a cozy thicket of streets just a few steps from South Station in Boston. And for several years, great things were happening for this family business as it grew to employ 20 people. Sadly, however, I learned of the Café only because of its closure because of the Covid19-related changes in dining, especially downtown dining. 

Photo: Robin Lubbock WBUR

I include the radio story Time to Cut Losses here in part because it is representative of the difficulties many independent businesses -- which all of the cafés featured on this blog are -- in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic. A general contraction of the economy combined with restrictions on indoor dining have forced several thousand small restaurants to close just in Massachusetts. 

Some have managed to remain open by reconfiguring on-site dining in various ways and by shifting to a focus on carry-out, delivery, or catering. This is where the location of The Kitchen Café may have limited its options: a very large proportion of its patrons could walk to the café from their offices until they shifted to working from home, in many cases at the far end of one of the train lines that brought them to the neighborhood. This raises the question of how businesses that serve office workers in such locations will fare post-pandemic. Polling of employers and employees alike suggests that after work-at-home is not longer required, some people will move back to their offices as before, some will never come back, and the average might be a reduction of about 1/3 in office usage. If this prediction holds true, maintaining and launching cafés in such locations will be even more challenging in the future.

The trajectory of launching a café is another reason I include this story. Jayme Valdez and his wife represent the thousands of people who start new cafés and restaurants each year. The story gives listeners a bit more insight into the kinds of stories behind most of the small shops that are described elsewhere on this blog. None of them succeed by accident, and despite the opening paragraph above, location only favors those who have the rest of what it takes to grow and sustain a business with notoriously small profit margins. My students and I have found scores of independent shops whose owners could probably tell similar stories. 

As we continue the blog project with a new group of students in the 2021 spring semester, we will be learning -- mostly at a distance -- about how they have fared in this most difficult time for small business.