June/July 2006

THE LOCAL SOLUTION
COMMENTARY

The Ugly Truth Behind My Adorable Neighborhood Coffeeshop
 

BY CYN KITCHEN
 

My hometown of Galesburg is a quaint little town near the center of Illinois with roots dating back to a group of abolitionist settlers who came from New York. Galesburg grew out of the prairie and left its mark in American history as the birthplace of the poet Carl Sandburg and the Ferris wheel. The town has endured decades of economic turmoil, but remains a close-knit community of 35,000 with low crime, good schools and beautiful architecture.
 

For years I dreamed of owning a cozy roastery tucked away in historic downtown, near Knox, a liberal arts college founded with the town. I would stock weird sodas and delicate pastries. I imagined hosting art shows, poetry slams and jazz performances.
 

Once I convinced my husband Ted that my passion was real, that opening a neighborhood coffeeshop was the ticket to our future, we began scouting for the perfect location. It took two years, but patience paid off in the form of an idyllic niche near the library. It had been a beauty parlor for nearly four decades, but we could imagine the possibilities beyond pink parasol wallpaper and green shampoo sinks.
 

Our kitchen became a mini-roastery where we spent untold hours learning about the origins of beans. We learned what temperature to roast each to best emphasize its individual profile and strongest characteristics. We researched coffee brokers throughout the nation and drove 600 miles to St. Paul to place our first half-ton order. For more than a year, we spent every spare moment renovating the store space. By the time we finished, we’d taken out a second mortgage on the house, and I’d quit my secure job as a magazine editor. Ah, the exhilaration of risk!
 

We opened for business as the crisp winds of fall whipped through town. I started each day at 4:30 a.m. We knew it was ambitious to stay open every night until 10 o’clock, but that’s what college kids wanted. Most nights I closed. Our first month in business, I worked over 500 hours.
 

During the day, I cleaned, stocked, ordered inventory, squeezed in bookkeeping, waited on customers and roasted coffee. It was difficult to keep up, so I hired a couple of college kids, but I still couldn’t leave without worrying. My children’s schoolwork began to slip, so we did homework between customers. I continued this pace six days a week for several months while Ted worked full time elsewhere to pay the bills. We understood sacrifice. We understood commitment.
 

Our only competition was a well-established coffeeshop several blocks away. With years of experience in a corporate setting, the owners possessed a shrewd business sense. My husband and I were among many, however, who thought their overpriced products were substandard in quality. Sure, they knew how to package and market, but their coffee tasted burnt. Their roasting philosophy emulated Starbucks, which has done an excellent job convincing the public that burned coffee is best. We saw through the tactics of mega-business. They’re marketing a myth. They sell consumers the idea that dark is best because they know coffee roasted to a lower temperature doesn’t hold its flavor as long, can’t sit on the shelf as long and will ultimately generate more waste. And what you’ve heard about dark coffee packing more caffeine? Lies. All lies.
 

We came at our mission with less business savvy than aesthetic flare, setting out to provide customers with what they didn‘t know they wanted. Over and over again, customers told us our product was excellent. We undersold the competition. We offered free Wi-Fi for people who wanted to hang out while our competitor shooed away customers who sat too long.
 

Several months into the endeavor, our accountant told us that the pastries we bought from a local bakery were killing us. Customers loved that they were made with all natural ingredients, but the shelf life of a pastry was two days at best. I would pay $1.99 for a Danish that I could sell for $2.29. If I didn’t sell everything I ordered each day, I lost money. Sure, I could buy cheaper pastries, but then my customers would notice I was selling them a marginal product. I decided that as long as I broke even, I could keep selling them and rely solely on profits from beverage and coffee sales. My accountant called the idea ludicrous and insisted I mark my pastries up 50 percent, but I knew no one would buy them when they could walk down the street to the bakery where they were made.
 

Around the holidays the college students went away for six weeks. Without them, business came to a standstill. I thought it would be our busiest time when, in fact, it nearly sunk us. In January, when the students returned, business recovered to an extent, but the bitter winds of winter discouraged pedestrian traffic, which we relied on, as there was little parking space near our front door, and we had no drive-thru, like our competitors.
 

As I grew more physically exhausted, I grew less patient. I put up with picky old women and crotchety old men. I was abused by hoity-toity academics from places like Bakersfield and Wichita who spoke in throaty accents as if they’d come from the bowels of Europe. I’d tolerated noisy teenagers, unruly toddlers and tightwad college students. I became withdrawn, suspicious, anxiety-ridden. My children grew frightened of me. My husband wore a look of chronic pain.
 

The moment I felt I could take a breather, the mailman would drop off a stack of bills with staggering totals that we added to a growing pile. We kept thinking business would turn a corner, and we prayed we could hang until it did.
 

Then one day in February, a business acquaintance, who owned a bar-and-grill and antique shop across the street, stopped by. He decided he was going to convert some of his building space into a roastery, right across the street. He’d been approved a large credit line at the bank and was eager to get started. He told me he realized coffee was big business, and he wanted a piece of the action. He’d never had a cup of coffee in his life; he was in it for the money. He invited me to come aboard, he’d be happy to have me. "I know what this means for you," he said. "but that’s the way business works."
 

In Galesburg, there are no restrictions on who can open a business. There are no ordinances to protect fledging start-ups. For instance, it would have helped if the city limited how many coffeeshops could open within a certain length of time and within specific proximity to one another. Protection of that nature might have given us time to get our bearings.
 

We had gut-wrenching flashes of the financial struggle that lay ahead. With competition so close and the college students leaving for three months in the summer, we lived in fear. Late one night as we lay in bed staring at the ceiling, we realized our best option was to close the doors. We were exhausted, our marriage was suffering and so were our children. We’d worked so hard and dreamed so big that letting it go felt like a death.
 

It didn’t matter that we had the best coffee in town. It didn’t matter that we had a great location and that our sense of style appealed to a broad audience. It didn’t matter that we were friendly, approachable, accommodating, and affordable. In the end it came down to business savvy, the thing we knew we lacked most in the beginning but fancied didn’t matter as much as our great product.
 

We were able to sell most of our equipment and inventory to the same bakery that supplied our pastries. They reopened under a new name. I hear business is so-so. Two other coffeeshops have popped up since. Everyone wants to get on the bandwagon, and I wonder if they’ve figured out what we could not, or if they too are ragged with worry and fatigue.
 

For sanity’s sake, we hang onto the positives — that we had a dream and went after it. We console ourselves with platitudes: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." "No guts, no glory." And we kick around Samuel Beckett’s quote, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." I can’t imagine trying again, but I understand what he means. And even if it didn’t turned out like we’d hoped, we learned something from it. That sometimes life puts us through experiences disguised as exercises in futility to impart a deeper lesson. Once I figure out what that lesson was, I’ll let you know.


Cyn Kitchen’s (cynkitchen.blogs.com) work has appeared in Salon, Carve, Literary Mama and sfwp.org. She and her husband haven't purchased coffee from a retailer since closing their shop. They set up their big roaster at home and fire it up often, just for the aroma. Cyn philosophizes that at least the experience gave her something to write about.