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Permalink Reply by Jason Shipley on April 22, 2009 at 8:31am

You have to look at your cogs on a regular basis, look at your wholesale prices also. The biggest thing for us was instituting a POS system and getting our arms around all of our costs and knowing exactly what you are selling. The thing you learn is that it's not enough to be busy you have to be efficient also.

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Permalink Reply by John Berkness on April 23, 2009 at 12:48pm

oh yeah man we have a pretty nice pos system as of this year

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Permalink Reply by William Ewing on April 24, 2009 at 6:19pm

Johnny you are my hero.

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Permalink Reply by emily jackson on April 25, 2009 at 2:28pm

hell, yeah i feel that busy. on saturdays we usually have 4 baristas working, plus the owner lurking in the wings to jump in and help out. it gets a bit overwhelming sometimes. we sell about the same amount of coffee and espresso drinks.orders for our espresso drinks and our "made to order" french press drinks too, have increased alot in the past few months. we have 4 pots (72 fluid ounces)of drip and 2 pots of french press made coffee available all day long. the owner gets stressed that we aren't taking in enough cash and i have to step back and realize that our operating costs are big as far as getting our wholesale products. we ship our coffee from a roaster on the west coast and we pay through the nose for shipping, plus costs of wholesale has gone up a third in the last year for us. the waste removal company, charges us an ungodly amount for trash and recycling removal. we use really good organic local milk.

on the note of busy-ness. i think that now is a time in this culture where consumers are looking for products that they can believe in. coffee with integrity from a locally owned shop for example. locally produced products. products with a name and recognizable face. this is a time in our culture, when starbucks has had to close 600 (?) stores.
3 times today, when i finished ringing someone's order through the POS, they double checked to see if the total i gave them was correct, not because they believed that i was overcharging them, but because they couldnt believe it was so cheap. giving the people good product at a lower cost definitely has the makings of customer loyalty.
the location of the shop is pretty poor ( a "D" location), but has become a destination unto itself in the past few years.

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Permalink Reply by ray peck on April 25, 2009 at 9:41pm

I am not sure whar you are getting at? Are you saying you have it good?

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Permalink Reply by emily jackson on April 26, 2009 at 3:02pm

i think what both johnny and myself are "getting at" is that in this time of unprecedented failure, small 3rd wave shops are doing astronomically well. even stores that have poor locations, in the middle of nowhere. it's not necessarily having a good location that makes a shop successsful but what the shop serves and does that makes it outshine/outperform others.

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Permalink Reply by Brady on April 26, 2009 at 6:05pm

Everyone else here doing astronomically well?

From the other thread on this subject, I was assuming that most were just kind of maintaining. Seems to me like all of the the shops in my area were holding on ok until unemployment passed 12%, then things kinda started heading south.

So no, we're not feeling this.

Here's my question... how's profitability?

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