In my short stint as a café owner, I was given a valuable lesson by a salesman when we were shopping for a commercial coffee machine.
First lesson: if there’s no budget or intention to hire good baristas, buy a semi-automatic or automatic machine. You want a one-touch solution that serves good coffee at consistent quality — something that won’t mess up the proportions of milk, water, and coffee, and brews at a consistent temperature.
Second lesson: buy a machine with two compartments for two types of beans. We ended up buying something like this from Franke:
I asked the salesman why two compartments.
His answer was a question: “Are you in this business to make money?”
Fill the first compartment with good — but expensive — beans. Fill the second with cheaper beans. If the order is an espresso or Americano, use the good beans. If it’s a latte, cappuccino, or some fancy invention like a pumpkin-velvet-chocolate-vanilla latte — use the cheap beans. Customers ordering those aren’t discerning coffee drinkers. The milk and add-ons overpower the coffee anyway.
The best part? A hazelnut-vanilla latte can be priced at 1.5 times the price of a black coffee.
I only drink black coffee. I’m never the spice-pumpkin-festive-latte type. But I get it — those are simply more lucrative products to move. A café has to make money.
A former colleague once said: “Let’s hire some NID guys. They can easily expand any design proposal by at least 20 slides to elaborate on the design thinking.” He was dead serious.
During my short stint as an employee, I was taught that perceived value is everything when dealing with clients — bloat the proposal so clients feel they’ve got their money’s worth.
I had a hard time adapting. I pride myself on stripping away excess, zooming into the core, presenting simple but effective solutions. Here I found myself in an environment where more equals value. I’d do my 20 slides presenting the actual solution and pass the deck on — where 20 slides of philosophical mumbo-jumbo would be added in front, Maslow hierarchy to Vastu insights, and another 30 shoddy options added after so the client could appreciate the volume of work done.
There are people who appreciate good black coffee. You can run an artisanal outlet, hire fine baristas, price the espresso at a premium and make a decent profit. Just don’t expect the masses to come. On the other side are the people who want anything but pure black coffee — and they’re happy to pay for the extras.
It is a matter of choice. Be a purist, or buy a machine with two compartments.
The salesman’s question captures it all.
“Are you in this business to make money?”
