How hard is the coffee industry for independent shop owners?
Many independent café owners say store revenue alone no longer covers living costs, let alone profit. Some respond by adding food, pushing social media marketing, or launching membership top-up cards to lock in regulars. Others take outside jobs and use the wages to cover the shop's daily expenses, a choice more common as competition tightens.
The logic is straightforward: rent is already paid or the premises are owned, so keeping the doors open costs less than closing. Employers are often willing to hire someone who runs a shop, since the hours are flexible. With the average startup cost for a coffee shop weighing on owners, outside income buys time for the original idea to work.
How tough is the coffee business this year? Many independent café owners have found that store revenue alone is no longer enough to support themselves, let alone to get rich through coffee. To keep alive the small shops they poured their hearts into, some have pivoted to offering food, some have thrown themselves into social media marketing, some have launched membership top-up schemes to lock in regulars, and some owners have simply chosen to take outside jobs, using their wages to subsidize the café's daily expenses. How do these "re-employed baristas" juggle their main jobs and side gigs? And are employers willing to take on a peer who runs a shop of their own? This article takes you behind the real circumstances of these coffee operators who persist for the love of it.
▲
Click to follow | Daily specialty coffee culture magazine Coffee Works
If you're one of the many who rushed to open a coffee shop, you've surely felt deeply this year just how hard this trade is to run. Never mind getting rich off coffee—just surviving on store revenue alone is quite a struggle, and more often than not you can only barely cover expenses with bits and pieces of income.
Even knowing full well that the shop is nowhere near profitable, a large number of café owners still choose to pay for their passion, just to keep that initial labor of love going.
Some owners have started studying social media operations, hoping to use the internet to convey their brand and coffee to more potential customers; some are thinking about first stabilizing old patrons by rolling out top-up membership cards, unlimited refills and other plans to lock in repeat business; and some have decisively pivoted, adding food to their menus in hopes of attracting more types of customers into the store and raising the average spend per customer... Everyone is fighting so hard, and when you get down to it, it's all about finding a way forward for their original aspiration.
If you look closely, you'll also notice that rather than offering discounts or adjusting their business direction, some individual café owners have already set off down the path of taking outside work. This sounds a bit absurd at first, but in today's brutally competitive coffee arena, these operators' logic isn't hard to understand.
Their reasoning goes: the shop is open anyway, and the rent is either low or the premises are their own property; if they run it single-handedly, the only fixed monthly costs are utilities plus raw material purchases. Besides, many independent cafés are far from office districts, so there are hardly any customers on weekdays—you can't just keep guarding an empty shop and burning time, and since they still have the ability to re-enter the workforce, they go out to earn money. That way, they can both support themselves and feed money back into the café.
You might ask, if the owner has gone out to work, who runs the shop? The answer is actually quite straightforward: either simply close up and reopen after getting off work, or entrust the shop to employees or trusted relatives and friends, and come back to take over shifts on their days off.
I once met an owner who runs two shops and came to apply for a job. When asked how the shops would be managed after he started work, he was candid, saying his wife and staff would hold the fort, and he'd come back to cover shifts on his rotating days off. His willingness to "take on work" is clearly not just about paying his employees' wages, but also about helping the little shop he poured his heart into get through its current difficulties.
But from another angle, from the hiring side's perspective, how many operators are happy to hire a peer who runs their own shop as an employee? While bar experience is a plus, considering factors like the person possibly leaving at any time, business philosophies that may not align, and the difficulty of fostering a sense of belonging, employers inevitably have misgivings and actually tend to prefer hiring inexperienced newcomers. So even if an owner is full of passion and wants to find work in the coffee industry to subsidize their shop, the actual difficulty of job-hunting is likely far greater than expected.
Of course, within this group of "re-employed baristas," it's also quite possible that many have substantial incomes to begin with, or simply opened a shop in their spare time, relying on their main job from start to finish to "feed" coffee as a side business and keep the physical store running.
For them, hustling like this to stay at break-even may really just be about safeguarding that original aspiration and passion. As one owner who persists in working a job to support his café put it: keep doing what you want to do—no matter how hard it gets, I don't want to lose that sentiment.
Disclaimer: Some images in this article are sourced from the internet. For some content on the website, such as images, we will respect the original creators' copyright and cite the source, but due to the sheer volume, a few images and texts may not have been credited in time; please forgive us. If the original creator has any dispute, they may contact the website to resolve it, and once verified we will promptly correct it. Compiled and edited by "Coffee Works"; please indicate the source when reposting. If there is any infringement, please let us know and we will delete it. Thank you~!
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
